This post was inspired by the recent wave of people sharing info about their CSS: Mark Otto at Github, Ian Feather at Lonely Planet and Chris Coyier at Codepen.
About two years ago I was working on a redesign of Groupon’s consumer website (which was later scrapped) when I was asked if I wanted to work on our internal tools team. “You won’t have to support Internet Explorer,” they said.
* Cue chorus of angels *
As Groupon had been experiencing exponential growth, many of our “internal tools” consisted of a bunch of Google Docs and things scribbled on cocktail napkins. The internal tools team was tasked with streamlining those processes. We had a half dozen or so dev teams working on different tools supported by just two designers. The challenge we faced was how to quickly crank out designs for these tools without having a horrible mishmash of CSS.
At first we debated the merits of using Twitter Bootstrap, which had just started gaining popularity at the time. We also looked at Zurb’s Foundation. Eventually we decided that we would roll our own CSS framework in order to keep things light and consistent with our designs. We called it Toolstrap (Bootstrap for Internal Tools).