Starting a new project is fun, starting a new project with the best/new technology available is even more exciting. There are many popular UI/Responsive frameworks available. The top two at this this time are Twitter’s Bootstrap and Zurb’s Foundation. Each of these frameworks are on multiple revisions and are used heavily on the web.
Bootstrap
I have used bootstrap for quite a few projects, it’s a great framework with a HUGE community. Bootstrap does a phenomenal job of including as many ui elements styled to match seamlessly with each other and themes abound all over the web. The way bootstrap handles it’s grid system is familiar and easy, but I am not a fan of how it handles the responsive resizing of grids and elements. Bootstraps approach to responsive columns is to add media queries to handle smaller screen sizes. While this works, and most people won’t notice, it does add additional overhead and load for mobile devices.
Another factor for me looking into another alternative to bootstrap is the fact that bootstrap sites look and behave like bootstrap. 95% of the site that use bootstrap are easily identifiable as bootstrap. Check out the bootstrap sponsored expo gallery to see what I mean.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying anything negative about the above sites. These sites all have good design, and they are well done.