---
title: Announcing Bitters, a Dash of Sass Stylesheets for Bourbon and Neat
teaser:
tags: bourbon,neat,sass,news,design
author: Kyle Fiedler
published_on: 2013-11-08
---

The designers here like to have simple stylesheets when starting a new project.
Styles that are better looking than browser defaults but not something that
that will dictate our visual design moving forward. These styles should also
remove a lot of the duplicated work we do when getting a project off the ground
so we can start solving harder problems faster.

Our long time solution to this problem was the stylesheets in
[Flutie](https://github.com/thoughtbot/flutie) but Flutie’s stylesheets had
grown outdated, its defaults and reset were getting in the way. We were
continually overriding the styles, which was adding unnecessary bloat to our
CSS. These styles weren’t doing their job, they were slowing us down at the
start of a project not helping us speed up.

Instead of trying to refine the styles in Flutie we decided to just remove them
and let Flutie stand alone as ActionView helpers. We didn’t just want to
duplicate the problems that we had with Flutie’s styles and wanted to start
from scratch. We also wanted to integrate this more fully with
[Bourbon](http://bourbon.io) and [Neat](http://neat.bourbon.io).

[Bitters](http://bitters.bourbon.io) aims to solve the same set of problems
that the Flutie stylesheets and the problems that raised out of Flutie’s
inattention. Unlike Flutie, the Bitters files should be installed into your
Sass directory and imported at the top of your main stylesheet. Once installed
the files should be edited to fit the style of the site or application. This
way you won’t override styles and won’t add unnecessary cruft to your
stylesheets, instead you’ll be building on top of the foundation that Bitters
provides.

Bitters gives you plain variables for type, sizes, and color, a simple grid
using Neat, smart defaults for typography and simply styled flashes for
notifications or errors. Most importantly it should set up a consistent
language and structure for your Sass.

We are still working out some of the details and I appreciate any feedback you
might have.