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Bulma vs Material Design: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Bulma and Material Design
Bulma and Material Design are both popular frameworks used for building responsive and visually appealing websites. While both frameworks provide a set of UI components and leverage modern web technologies, there are several key differences between them.
Flexbox vs. Grid System: Bulma primarily relies on a flexbox grid system for building layouts, offering flexibility and ease in creating responsive designs. On the other hand, Material Design utilizes a 12-column grid system, allowing for greater control over the layout structure but with a slightly steeper learning curve.
Styling Approach: Bulma follows a more minimalistic and lightweight styling approach, keeping its classes and CSS file size relatively small. Material Design, in contrast, provides a more opinionated and highly detailed visual language, resulting in larger file sizes and a more comprehensive set of predefined styles.
Customizability: Bulma offers extensive customization options, allowing developers to easily modify colors, typography, and other aspects of the framework to match specific brand requirements. Material Design, while providing some customization options, maintains a more standardized and consistent visual style across different applications.
Accessibility and Standards: Material Design places a strong emphasis on accessibility and adhering to web standards, ensuring its components are keyboard-navigable, properly labeled, and meet accessibility guidelines. Bulma, though not lacking in accessibility features, may require some additional efforts for meeting specific accessibility requirements.
Documentation and Community Support: Bulma has a well-organized and comprehensive documentation, covering all aspects of the framework in a user-friendly manner, making it easy to get started and find solutions to common issues. Material Design, being backed by Google, benefits from a large community and extensive resources, including detailed guidelines, case studies, and design tools.
Browser Compatibility: Bulma is designed to have good browser compatibility, supporting modern browsers and providing fallbacks for older ones. Material Design, owing to its reliance on some newer CSS techniques and web APIs, may require additional polyfills or alternative approaches for proper compatibility on older browsers.
In summary, Bulma stands out for its flexible flexbox grid system, minimalistic styling approach, extensive customization options, and comprehensive documentation, while Material Design excels in its opinionated visual language, adherence to accessibility and web standards, strong community support, and detailed design guidelines.
I'm building, from scratch, a webapp. It's going to be a dashboard to check on our apps in New Relic and update the Apdex from the webapp. I have just chosen Next.js as our framework because we use React already, and after going through the tutorial, I just loved the latest changes they have implemented.
But we have to decide on a CSS framework for the UI. I'm partial to Bulma because I love that it's all about CSS (and you can use SCSS from the start), that it's rather lightweight and that it doesn't come with JavaScript clutter. One of the things I hate about Bootstrap is that you depend on jQuery to use the JavaScript part. My boss loves UIkIt, but when I've used it in the past, I didn't like it.
What do you think we should use? Maybe you have another suggestion?
I have used bulma in several projects. We could not customize with the websites very well. Also when we need "quick solutions" Bulma is not suitable (I mean basic animations, to-top buttons, transparent navbar solutions etc. For these solutions, you need extra js codes).
Everybody knows about Bootstrap (heavy but popular).
Now we start a new project with UI kit, I like it. Pros: It is fast and lightweight and imho it has very good UI. Cons: Small community. Documentation.
Check this link for kick-off. https://github.com/zzseba78/Kick-Off
Maybe it is helpful.
Been checking out Bulma, myself, and really dig it. I like that it's a great base level jumping off point. You can get a layout going with it, pretty quickly, and then customize as you want. It definitely sounds like it's the one you're leaning towards but a big factor would be who will be using it most? Your boss, yourself, others? Whichever you like best, you'll prob be most productive with but if in the end your boss says it has to be UIkit, then best to be open-minded and give it another shot. Sometimes you may not jive with new tools in your stack, at first, but then they can become tools you learn to love. Best to you in your decision! Take care & keep safe.
I've moved away from the concept of UI kits. Not that many support CSS grid. A lot of the icons are easier to use in SVG. I've had success in the concept of design framework and design tokens. I build my brand identity in Figma, and extract in Diez. Then Diez integrates into React and SASS. Much easier because design is decoupled from software in a central authority, and software updates automatically from design changes.
Honestly - pick whatever you are the most comfortable with. You can achieve almost the same effects with different tools, so why not use something I like using?
Actually it really depends on your needs, there are 3 types of UI frameworks you can use:
-
A complete set of UI components like: https://react-bulma.dev/en/getting-started.
Pros:
Having a lot of pre-built UI components saves a lot of time
Cons:
need to learn the react framework and the bulma styles, and it's harder to customize to your needs
-
A pure css framework, like Bulma, where you write all the components yourself.
Pros:
A lot of flexibility to build the components you need
Cons:
You are bound to Bulma classes and markup.
Takes more time since you need to build the components
A utility class framework like: https://tailwindcss.com/.
Pros:
Most flexible, mix and match classes as you like and build your own markup
Very easy to customize to your needs
Cons:
Might take time to get used to and takes more time since you need to build the components
If you choose options one, then it's just a matter of deciding what style you like (material,ant, bulma) and go with the library that implements it If you go with pure css and build your own components, I can't recommend tailwind enough, I've been finding myself building entire pages without writing a single line of css.
And if later on, the designer wants to make a change to some color, or size, I just need to change one value in the config file, and the entire app is updated.
I used UIKit and Bootstrap many times. I love Bootstrap for fast, easy layouts to web apps. Clean code, easiest and fastest way to write layouts for front end if you learned something before about Bootstrap. Now in React I use React-Boostrap too. About UIKit I can say its nice idea. It's easier than Bootstrap. This is good option for trainee developer to learn how u should create layout of your website, but for me UIKit have not enough functions. If you need to create something complicated, u have an error in your mind. You must create amazing code combinations for UIKit where in Bootstrap in the same ideas you have easy solutions.
Pros of Bulma
- Easy setup12
- Easy-to-customize the sass build6
- Community-created themes6
- Responsive5
- Great docs5
- Easy to learn and use4
Pros of Material Design
- They really set a new bar in design5
- An intuitive design4
- Simply, And Beautiful3
- Many great libraries2
- Composants0
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Cons of Bulma
- Not yet supporting Vue 32
Cons of Material Design
- Sometimes, it can hang the browser2