CSS Grid

In CSS land there are multiple ways of positioning elements. The most common methods are absolute positioning position: absolute;, Flexbox display: flex; and CSS grid display: grid;.

This article will describe how to create a layout with CSS Grid.

CSS grid places its direct children onto a "grid". In the following HTML snippet the parent element has the class 'grid-container' and 6 children.

<div class="grid-container">
  <div>Grid item 1</div>
  <div>Grid item 2</div>
  <div>Grid item 3</div>
  <div>Grid item 4</div>
  <div>Grid item 5</div>
  <div>Grid item 6</div>
</div>

We first have to set the parent element to be displayed as a grid via the CSS property "display".

<style>
.grid-container {
  display: grid;
}
</style>

The code above will not show any difference in the browser. We also have to create columns and or rows. We can do this with the properties grid-template-columns and grid-template-rows.

You set the amount of columns by adding or removing the width of each column. For example grid-template-columns: 200px 200px will get two columns of each 200 pixels width. grid-template-columns: 300px 500px 300px will create 3 columns, the first and laset 300px wide, the middle columns 500 pixels wide.

<style>
.grid-container {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px;
  grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
}
</style>

The following code creates a grid of 3 columns, each column 200px wide and 2 rows of 300px height.

<div class="grid-container">
  <div>Grid item 1</div>
  <div>Grid item 2</div>
  <div>Grid item 3</div>
  <div>Grid item 4</div>
  <div>Grid item 5</div>
  <div>Grid item 6</div>
</div>

<style>
.grid-container {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px;
  grid-template-rows: 300px 300px;
}
</style>

Resources

• CSS Grid course by Wes Bos is full-on in depth course on CSS Grid
• MDN Web Docs has a good introduction to CSS Grid
• CSS Grid Garden is a fun CSS grid game
• CSS Tricks has a good reference article on CSS Grid