Bootstrap is a great example of something that might have taken _some_ work away from _some_ designers, but the whole it contributes back to is much richer as a result.
Since Bootstrap and other high-quality frameworks have been released I've noticed an all-around higher baseline quality of design (which is a good thing - I'm well aware that there's not always the time or money to involve a designer), and more importantly they provide a nice _baseline_ for developers to get more interested in honing their own design skills.
A parallel might be…say…Rails? I could never have dreamt of making my own web apps in Ruby without it - as a beginner things would have just been far too intimidating. Too many things to learn. But Rails quickly got me to a base level of competency from which I could add skills, and go back to basics (and write things in vanilla Ruby etc). A bit of hand-holding is great.
But yeah - as a craftsman who respects others I try to always employ highly-paid local engineers. That's kind of why we don't (always) like 99designs (but that's a different discussion for a different day I think)
I don't really know the designer market, but I was not arguing that bootstrap was overall a bad thing, but I get the impression that you don't need a designer to get a basic site off the ground, much like php or rails means you don't need a developer to get off the ground.
I would suggest we are eliminating the basement level of
incompetant design or development, at the cost of not having any basement level clients. This is again probably a good thing.
And yes discussion is going off on a tangent. Stopping now :-)
Edit : thinking it through I would say that the 99designs logo was actually unsatisfactory. It was not technically so (vector graphics, nice clean lines, looks vaguely cloud)
What it was not was anything to do with my business my values my goals or the clients I want to communicate with.
As such it was unsatisfactory - and I guess that's the pain point a good designer needs to beat. Just as I as a custom software developer needs to solve a clients actual problems to be more value than an off shelf product, same for designers.
Just wanted to point out the 99designs et al are not what I think a "designer" does.
Since Bootstrap and other high-quality frameworks have been released I've noticed an all-around higher baseline quality of design (which is a good thing - I'm well aware that there's not always the time or money to involve a designer), and more importantly they provide a nice _baseline_ for developers to get more interested in honing their own design skills.
A parallel might be…say…Rails? I could never have dreamt of making my own web apps in Ruby without it - as a beginner things would have just been far too intimidating. Too many things to learn. But Rails quickly got me to a base level of competency from which I could add skills, and go back to basics (and write things in vanilla Ruby etc). A bit of hand-holding is great.
But yeah - as a craftsman who respects others I try to always employ highly-paid local engineers. That's kind of why we don't (always) like 99designs (but that's a different discussion for a different day I think)