Updated Apr 04 2019
The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then one day.. I got in. --- Tron: Legacy
grid-area
as a shorthandspan
CSS Grid is a fundamentally new approach to building layouts using CSS.
Keep an eye on the CSS Grid Layout page on caniuse.com to find out which browsers currently support it. At the time of writing, Apr 2019, all major browsers (except IE, which will never have support for it) are already supporting this technology, covering 92% of all users.
CSS Grid is not a competitor to Flexbox. They interoperate and collaborate on complex layouts, because CSS Grid works on 2 dimensions (rows AND columns) while Flexbox works on a single dimension (rows OR columns).
Building layouts for the web has traditionally been a complicated topic.
I won’t dig into the reasons for this complexity, which is a complex topic on its own, but you can think yourself as a very lucky human because nowadays you have 2 very powerful and well supported tools at your disposal:
These 2 are the tools to build the Web layouts of the future.
Unless you need to support old browsers like IE8 and IE9, there is no reason to be messing with things like:
display: table
hacksIn this guide there’s all you need to know about going from a zero knowledge of CSS Grid to being a proficient user.
The CSS Grid layout is activated on a container element (which can be a div
or any other tag) by setting display: grid
.
As with flexbox, you can define some properties on the container, and some properties on each individual item in the grid.
These properties combined will determine the final look of the grid.
The most basic container properties are grid-template-columns
and grid-template-rows
.
Those properties define the number of columns and rows in the grid, and they also set the width of each column/row.
The following snippet defines a grid with 4 columns each 200px wide, and 2 rows with a 300px height each.
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
}
Here’s another example of a grid with 2 columns and 2 rows:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 100px 100px;
}
Many times you might have a fixed header size, a fixed footer size, and the main content that is flexible in height, depending on its length. In this case you can use the auto
keyword:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-rows: 100px auto 100px;
}
In the above examples we made pretty, regular grids by using the same values for rows and the same values for columns.
You can specify any value for each row/column, to create a lot of different designs:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 100px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 100px 50px;
}
Another example:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 10px 100px;
grid-template-rows: 100px 10px;
}
Unless specified, there is no space between the cells.
You can add spacing by using those properties:
grid-column-gap
grid-row-gap
or the shorthand syntax grid-gap
.
Example:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 100px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 100px 50px;
grid-column-gap: 25px;
grid-row-gap: 25px;
}
The same layout using the shorthand:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 100px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 100px 50px;
grid-gap: 25px;
}
Every cell item has the option to occupy more than just one box in the row, and expand horizontally or vertically to get more space, while respecting the grid proportions set in the container.
Those are the properties we’ll use for that:
grid-column-start
grid-column-end
grid-row-start
grid-row-end
Example:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
}
.item1 {
grid-column-start: 2;
grid-column-end: 4;
}
.item6 {
grid-column-start: 3;
grid-column-end: 5;
}
The numbers correspond to the vertical line that separates each column, starting from 1:
The same principle applies to grid-row-start
and grid-row-end
, except this time instead of taking more columns, a cell takes more rows.
Those properties have a shorthand syntax provided by:
grid-column
grid-row
The usage is simple, here’s how to replicate the above layout:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
}
.item1 {
grid-column: 2 / 4;
}
.item6 {
grid-column: 3 / 5;
}
grid-area
as a shorthandThe grid-area
property can be used as a shorthand for the grid-column
and grid-row
shorthands, when you need to apply both to a single element. Instead of having:
.item1 {
grid-row: 1 / 4;
grid-column: 3 / 5;
}
You can use
.item1 {
grid-area: 1 / 3 / 4 / 5;
}
(grid-row-start / grid-column-start / grid-row-end / grid-column-end)
span
Another approach is to set the starting column/row, and set how many it should occupy using span
:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
}
.item1 {
grid-column: 2 / span 2;
}
.item6 {
grid-column: 3 / span 2;
}
span
works also with the non-shorthand syntax:
.item1 {
grid-column-start: 2;
grid-column-end: span 2;
}
and you can also use on the start property. In this case, the end position will be used as a reference, and span
will count “back”:
.item1 {
grid-column-start: span 2;
grid-column-end: 3;
}
Specifying the exact width of each column or row is not ideal in every case.
A fraction is a unit of space.
The following example divides a grid into 3 columns with the same width, 1/3 of the available space each.
.container {
grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr;
}
You can also use percentages, and mix and match fractions, pixels, rem and percentages:
.container {
grid-template-columns: 3rem 15% 1fr 2fr
}
repeat()
repeat()
is a special function that takes a number that indicates the number of times a row/column will be repeated, and the length of each one.
If every column has the same width you can specify the layout using this syntax:
.container {
grid-template-columns: repeat(4, 100px);
}
This creates 4 columns with the same width.
Or using fractions:
.container {
grid-template-columns: repeat(4, 1fr);
}
Common use case: Have a sidebar that never collapses more than a certain amount of pixels when you resize the window.
Here’s an example where the sidebar takes 1/4 of the screen and never takes less than 200px:
.container {
grid-template-columns: minmax(200px, 3fr) 9fr;
}
You can also set just a maximum value using the auto
keyword:
.container {
grid-template-columns: minmax(auto, 50%) 9fr;
}
or just a minimum value:
.container {
grid-template-columns: minmax(100px, auto) 9fr;
}
grid-template-areas
By default elements are positioned in the grid using their order in the HTML structure.
Using grid-template-areas
You can define template areas to move them around in the grid, and also to spawn an item on multiple rows / columns instead of using grid-column
.
Here’s an example:
<div class="container">
<main>
...
</main>
<aside>
...
</aside>
<header>
...
</header>
<footer>
...
</footer>
</div>
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
grid-template-areas:
"header header header header"
"sidebar main main main"
"footer footer footer footer";
}
main {
grid-area: main;
}
aside {
grid-area: sidebar;
}
header {
grid-area: header;
}
footer {
grid-area: footer;
}
Despite their original order, items are placed where grid-template-areas
define, depending on the grid-area
property associated to them.
You can set an empty cell using the dot .
instead of an area name in grid-template-areas
:
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
grid-template-areas:
". header header ."
"sidebar . main main"
". footer footer .";
}
You can make a grid extend to fill the page using fr
:
.container {
display: grid;
height: 100vh;
grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr 1fr;
grid-template-rows: 1fr 1fr;
}
Here is a simple example of using CSS Grid to create a site layout that provides a header op top, a main part with sidebar on the left and content on the right, and a footer afterwards.
Here’s the markup:
<div class="wrapper">
<header>Header</header>
<article>
<h1>Welcome</h1>
<p>Hi!</p>
</article>
<aside><ul><li>Sidebar</li></ul></aside>
<footer>Footer</footer>
</div>
and here’s the CSS:
header {
grid-area: header;
background-color: #fed330;
padding: 20px;
}
article {
grid-area: content;
background-color: #20bf6b;
padding: 20px;
}
aside {
grid-area: sidebar;
background-color: #45aaf2;
}
footer {
padding: 20px;
grid-area: footer;
background-color: #fd9644;
}
.wrapper {
display: grid;
grid-gap: 20px;
grid-template-columns: 1fr 3fr;
grid-template-areas:
"header header"
"sidebar content"
"footer footer";
}
I added some colors to make it prettier, but basically it assigns to every different tag a grid-area
name, which is used in the grid-template-areas
property in .wrapper
.
When the layout is smaller we can put the sidebar below the content using a media query:
@media (max-width: 500px) {
.wrapper {
grid-template-columns: 4fr;
grid-template-areas:
"header"
"content"
"sidebar"
"footer";
}
}
See the Pen CSS Grid example with sidebar by Flavio Copes (@flaviocopes) on CodePen.
These are the basics of CSS Grid. There are many things I didn’t include in this introduction but I wanted to make it very simple, to start using this new layout system without making it feel overwhelming.
I wrote an entire book on this topic 👇
© 2023 Flavio Copes
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