Vertical rhythm for Twitter's Bootstrap

Question

Are there any existing plugins/extensions/methods to maintain vertical rhythm for Twitter's Bootstrap project?

It is quite a laborious task to create good vertical rhythm templates, I would rather use a pre-baked solution. I am open to creative suggestions, I just want my pages nicely aligned in the end.

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Edit: To clarify what I am after...

Vertical rhythm is a technique used to ensure that every element on a page lines up according to a horizontal grid. This is achieved by setting the height, padding and margin of every item to conform to a standard unit line size. If a line of text in a paragraph is 20px high (including margin and padding) then maybe a heading 4 will also be 20px high, and a heading 1 might be 40px high. This maintains the rhythm of the text across columns.

I want to use this technique in combination with bootstrap (from twitter), but it would be quite a lot of work to get everything looking nice. For example, all the buttons would need to conform to the same vertical height definition as paragraph text etc... There are other standard controls used in bootstrap which would also all need rules to define their height appropriately.

I could start with a generic solution for vertical rhythm, which would go a long way to achieving what I want, but I wanted to know if anyone else has started this, or has any idea of another way to achieve this.

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Edit: Assuming there is nothing like what I want...

Maybe just a good vertical-rhythm based css template would be a good starting point. Preferably something that is continuing to be developed, is already usable, well thought out, and adaptable.

Answer 1

I think what you're going after is understood. Problem is: you're looking for a grid schema in one dimension (a "vertical rhythm" set in accordance with, for example, proportional line heights...which, in a manner of speaking, measures and aligns things along a given page's Y axis)...but doing things in that manner might potentially be at odds with Bootstrap's pre-existing 12-column grid system (which, in contrast, measures and aligns things along the page's X axis). You want to "proportionalize" the height of each "row" in the framework. BUT: keep in mind, Bootstrap's design is intended to promote not just proportionality via columns solely for the sake of looking nice, but to also make pages responsive--i.e., to allow page elements to "flow" around one another vertically, and to nest fluidly. And, in that sense, issues pertaining to the height of elements measured along the Y axis may already be accounted for... I recall that most of the typographic elements in the base CSS file have proportional em sizes, and/or likewise proportional top and bottom padding, etc. Generally speaking, things are not so arbitrary that the framework screams a need for additional styling in the manner you're considering.

Even so: Bootstrap's base CSS file isn't so intolerably extensive that it'd be impossible for you to tweak the height of various element classes and IDs yourself without too much trouble. In any case, it's highly unlikely you're really going to need to do that with every styled element, right? In fact, as a framework, Bootstrap includes styling for many elements which may not even be in the app for which you're designing the front end. (EXAMPLE: Does your app have drop down menus? Great. You can style the "vertical rhythm" of drop down menus. BUT: are you also using pills or tabs in your nav bar? No pills, you say? Well, you can just delete a couple hundred lines of code in the stylesheet and save yourself the effort of having to apply your "vertical rhythm" to those unneeded elements.) Elsewise, for the elements that remain and that you do in fact need, just use a text editor to find-replace the values for line height, top and bottom padding, margins, font-size, etc...and test it out. As a CSS framework, it's pretty clear how Bootstrap is laid out; relevant elements are well sorted, and grouped together within the stylesheet's code for the most part. Once you do complete tweaking of the base CSS file, just minify your revised stylesheet...to replace the pre-existing minified version...or, perhaps, just serve it up from CloudFront if you want to optimize.

Answer 2

The Compass CSS Authoring Framework has explicit support for vertical rhythm based typography. For starters you can check out this short video tutorial.

Answer 3

Have you looked at the Square Grid CSS framework?

http://thesquaregrid.com/

A simple CSS framework for designers and developers, based on 35 equal-width columns. It aims to cut down on development time and help you create beautiful-structured websites.

Square Grid provides a standard horizontal grid, but it also maintains a vertical grid, using a standard "square" of 28px. It is really just a grid, not a full CSS library like Bootstrap (i.e. no buttons, menus, etc).

I used to for one project and found it to be pretty intuitive, though I ultimately decided that it was too hard for me to keep track of both the vertical and horizontal grid, especially when thinking about responsive design.

You may be able to combine the two, or at least take a look at the square grid source code which is pretty simple CSS to get some ideas on how to adapt Bootstrap to meet your needs.