With or without a Front-End Framework ?

'Why mobile first', suppose the easy argument is the market. Over a billion devices, and a good portion of them (http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/05/the-rise-of-the-mobile-only-us/) are mobile-only. Heh, that article surprised me. I was thinking about 25%, looks like it's now 30-ish and rising.

There's almost a third of your audience that never sees the painstakingly crafted desktop-oriented design. Now, personally, I prefer designing for the desktop... more real estate means more room to get (too) fancy.

When & Why Bootstrap... Full frameworks are great to get up and running quickly. All other things being equal, I'd say designing from scratch always wins out. But, of course, all other things are never equal. Bootstrap's great for a quick front end with plenty of features, but can be overkill for some projects, not enough for others, and not quite right for others. It's not an either-or deal, at least (I regularly cherry pick bootstrap). Can just use the parts you need, or find something that's just a grid, or just typography, etc.

My view on it is that Bootstrap, Foundation and other opinionated frameworks add in too much to start with. Personally I think pure.io is a good choice as it's lightweight, modular and not opinionated at all.

An issue with allgrid frameworks share is that they also tightly couple HTML to CSS creating a lot of technical debt, there's a simple solution to do that, use a CSS preprocessor instead of embedding framework classes into your HTML.

There was a great thread here on the forum that discussed this a while back.

For a more thorough discussion on these points check out:

• On Grid Frameworks
• Please stop embedding Bootstrap classes in your HTML
• Bootstrap without all the technical debt
• A Tale of Two Bootstraps: Lessons Learned in Maintainable CSS

I have just finished a site using bootstrap and i have to say i probably couldn't of done it in the time i had without it, but boy does my html look like a bag of crud, i bet i could get rid of 50% of the code if i didn't use it. But it done what was needed so i shouldn't complain.

I have a little more time with my next project so I'm using The semantic grid system and a bit of Less this time around.

Thanks for all the great answers, very informative !

Another thing I had in mind is regarding a best-practice I was doubting about... As said and written in many places - it is best to use fluid & adaptable measurements as much as possible, like em's, percentages, vm's, vw's , rather than fixed pixels.

So when starting a design from scratch, assuming I am designing to my current view port, and would want it to be responsive eventually - should I start designing with fixed pixels till it fit's my view port perfectly and only then convert them to a fluid foundation with the given formula of pixels to em's\percentages? Or should I start straight away by using only fluid & adaptable measurements?