
Show HN: Material Kit – Free Bootstrap UI Kit Based on Material Design - axelut
http://demos.creative-tim.com/material-kit/index.html
======
metalliqaz
Honest question from a non-web dev. Are these things actually used for real
working websites? Are there any examples other than landing pages and blog
posts?

One of the things that keeps me from using a web platform on my projects is
that I don't want to have to worry about aesthetics. With good ole Windows, I
drop some controls and buttons into a designer and I know it is going to look
pretty good and be obviously functional to all users. I don't have time to
place individual lines and worry about the alignment of shading and curves.
Projects like Bootstrap interest me because they offer a way for me to focus
on function rather than looks, however I never seem them in action for
something substantial. Say, a financial accounts manager.

Are there projects out there using these templates for such purposes?

~~~
poof131
These tools: bootstrap, material, etc. seem to be exactly what you need. They
make sure your style is consistent and looks good without too much work. You
can then configure the framework to make it look unique to your application.
My impression is these frameworks are used all over the place in production,
they are just customized so you might not recognize them. The last three
companies I’ve worked at, one used angular material, one used bootstrap, and
one had a custom css framework. The later had a tendency to build internal
frameworks instead of new product and is suffering the consequences.

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shutton
Looks good.

I've been very happy with
[http://materializecss.com/](http://materializecss.com/). Really simple to use
with some very slick touches.

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LoSboccacc
"Free?" what the heck is a Creative Tim license?

~~~
axelut
That is the license that we give to our users. As an overview, you can use
this product for your personal projects, startups or for a client. What you
cannot do is to get this product and resell it/post it anywhere as your own
created product. This is what we want to protect. That's it. Please let me
know if I can help with other information.

~~~
drdaeman
Lack of exact licensing terms may make any legal dept (or just copyright-
conscious individual) wary. The table at /license doesn't count - there are no
definitions and without those some rows are really odd, like "multiple
developers" restriction (who counts as a "developer"? does the "personal"
license forbid two computer-savvy persons making a website? or, say, what if I
code the page myself but then call someone for assistance?)

Legalese sucks hard (and layman-readable licenses are hard to write), but
ambiguity is even worse.

~~~
axelut
Yes, you're right, the legal stuff sucks. We wanted to make it as simple as
possible and not have 100 pages terms and conditions. We will try to make that
more clear so people can understand that if they get this product for Free can
be used by how many devs they have, in how many products they want.

Our business is to create good looking products that speed-up the development
for web developers and not to go after people who use our products without a
license. Probably there are 1000 people every day who just "View Source" of
the page and get the product. We cannot and don't want to focus on those
people :D

~~~
yodon
Please stop wasting potential customer's time by offering a great looking,
professional-grade product with a horrible, non-professional license. I'd love
to use your templates in my business. The pricing is on the high end of what
I'd pay but not so high that I'd walk away. But I have to walk away,I can't
allow myself to waste any more time looking at your site because the license
is an absolute deal breaker.

Licenses aren't just "ugh, we do software but we have to put up some stuff
about licensing." Licenses are essential to any form of commercial software.
If I base my front end on your bundle, which I paid for, I'm basing my
_business_ on your bundle. If I don't know what I've bought and what I can and
can't do with your bundle, I don't know what I can do with my business. That's
an absolute deal breaker. There's a reason why licenses look the way they do.
This kind of stuff is incredibly hard to specify and the evaluation criteria
isn't "I'm a programmer and I think I know what it means" it's "I'm a court of
law reviewing how licenses have been interpreted historically for the past
thousand years."

Did you pay a lawyer who specializes in software licenses to write that
license? If you did, find a different lawyer. If you didn't, take down the
license _and your offer to let people use software you don 't know how to
license_ until you have found an actual lawyer and had them draft an actual
license that is as professional as your product.

If you want a plain-vanilla license out of their law firm's files, expect it
to cost a few thousand dollars to have your license prepared (mostly for the
time it takes them to understand what you want). If you want an unusual or
highly customized license, expect it to cost more like five to ten thousand
dollars to have it prepared (because they will need to bill you for time spent
writing that custom document). Licenses are hard. They are literally the
contract between your business and your customers' businesses. They matter.

If you had a real license, I would have bought a pro license this morning. You
don't, so all I can do is complain about it on hacker news and hope in some
future life I find your site again and find a decent license on it.

~~~
axelut
Thank you for the detailed explanation. We have over 1 million users who
checked our resources, 97.000+ web developers are using them in 150.000+
projects and this is the first time when somebody is not happy with our
licensing options. We will see what we can do in this area.

~~~
yodon
Given the number of questions on this HN page about licensing I think it's a
mistake to conclude my comment is the first time someone wasn't happy with
your licensing (And people who pay for software tend to be the same people who
care about licensing, so the fraction who care about licensing is likely to be
a much higher fraction of potential _paying_ customers than simply
x/1.000.000)

How about just offering it for sale on envato under their licensing. Yes, you
give up a bit of revenue because they take a cut but you don't have to pay a
lawyer to draft a license for you, and you can still offer it on your own page
under your own non-professionally-drafted license at the same time if you
really want to do that too.

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pc86
Is it possible to upgrade a personal license to developer? IE when
bootstrapping a product, getting customer feedback, and then upgrading when
you actually start charging people?

~~~
axelut
Yes, you can do that whenever you want

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ben_jones
Personal preference but does anyone else not like material design concepts?

~~~
pbreit
I initially really liked material because it seemed nice and clean but the
animations have gotten out of hand, IMO, particularly when used on desktop. Is
there a non/less-animated version?

~~~
freestockoption
If they do it in CSS, I bet you can remove the animations by setting the
animationduration property to 0 seconds.

Or if you want to aggravate users, override it so that each animation takes
10seconds. :)

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rtcoms
I would like to use it for one of the saas application. I am not sure by when
it will start generating revenue.

Can I use personal licence till the the time my app is not earning any revenue
?

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laurencei
Looks amazing - great work!

This might be something I can use for a new SaaS I'm doing. Is there a
"dashboard" type page?

And something with Tables/graphs etc?

~~~
axelut
At this moment we are working on Material Dashboard. It will come in the next
weeks and it will be for Free having all the basic elements that you need to
create a Dashboard (tables, charts, maps, forms etc). Then there will also be
a Premium version for that with more components and customization. But the
Free version will be enough for most of the cases.

It will be something like another dashboard that we created:
[http://demos.creative-tim.com/light-bootstrap-
dashboard](http://demos.creative-tim.com/light-bootstrap-dashboard)

~~~
laurencei
So can I clarify - will this be like an "add on" to the Material Kit that is
posted here? i.e. can I use the Material Dashboard + Material Kit together?

Or will it be it's own standalone product?

i.e. can I start developing the Material Kit now, and add the dashboard on
later?

~~~
axelut
It will be a standalone product, but It will have all the components that are
in the Material Kit. So you will use Material Kit when you create the
Presentation page or landing page of your product and then on the admin part
you will use Material Dashboard. They will have the same design line so there
will be consistency in the overall design of your web app.

You can start developing with Material Kit, then when we release the Dashboard
you just change the CSS with the new one and also get the new Structure of the
page (Sidebar + Main Area).

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Madawar
This is nice and your other products are really nice. Was thinking of doing
semantic ui for my next project but this will do. Pre-sale question if I want
to resell a final product on envato will the developer license do (that is if
i dont attach the source materials for the themes).

Also what License is suitable for an open source project?

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ruler88
Looks great! Someone should make these into react components :)

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axelut
Hi guys,

If you want to give use feedback, want to contribute or have any issue, here
is the Github Repo: [https://github.com/timcreative/material-
kit](https://github.com/timcreative/material-kit)

~~~
askvikasr
Saw the live preview. Can people customize the color of entire UI kit before
downloading?

~~~
axelut
Unfortunately, you cannot change the colors before downloading. You can do
that, very easy, after you download using the SASS variables and a SASS
compiler.

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erlapso
Why didn't you contribute to [https://github.com/FezVrasta/bootstrap-material-
design/](https://github.com/FezVrasta/bootstrap-material-design/) instead?

~~~
56k
To make money I'd assume.

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desireco42
I just looked at it and looked at pro version. Very compelling in my view,
congrats. I know people might have different uses and approaches, but I think
if it can save me a lot of time, it is worth it.

~~~
axelut
@desireco42 we are glad that you like! It will definitely save you a lot o
time :-)

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nik736
Am I the only one who thinks material design looks really bad? :-/

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deliriousferret
I'm thinking of using Material Design Lite for my next project
[https://github.com/google/material-design-
lite](https://github.com/google/material-design-lite)

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magic_beans
Hm, using Gigi Hadid as the profile pic is pretty lame. :/

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speps
Change that woman's picture at the bottom, not classy in my opinion.

Also, in SeaMonkey, the part with the sliders is like the sluggiest I've ever
seen a website...

~~~
TheCoreh
Why is it not classy? The picture looks like a fashion photo shoot, probably
for the earrings

~~~
speps
Not everyone's culture would find that picture okay. It's not hard to find
something else like a tree that would work just as well. Also, why not a guy?

~~~
Larrikin
Why is a guy ok? I expected a girl in a bikini or something but it's just a
headshot of a girl. That's totally fine in most places in the world.

~~~
noir_lord
> That's totally fine in most places in the world.

...and the places that isn't can suck it frankly.

~~~
kelvin0
YeeeHaw...! Don't forget in some cultures women cannot have their faces shown
in public spaces (burka?). I respect that, but in general we should mine such
culture sensibilities before posting something.

~~~
noir_lord
I've observed that often the people screaming "respect my right to do <thing
x>" are the ones who are intolerant to my right to think <thing x> is
wrong/stupid and say so.

You see this particularly with religions who think that belief in something
unprovable should give them special rights.

