CSS recently launched Flexbox, and this layout mode clearly improves on the box model. In Flexbox, you don’t have to use floats and clears but can set up rows or columns with flex containers and flex items within those containers. This facilitates designing layouts for navigation bars, footers, sidebars and other elements that change in responsive Web design depending on the size of the screen.
The CSS Grid specification improves upon FlexBox layout and will soon become the standard for website design projects. This specification allows for responsive design without compromise and without being forced into using a framework. Using CSS Grid does require a level of hand-coding for each project, but you can still reuse many elements of code and employ style guides to reduce your need for new code. Although there’s more work, the results of using the CSS Grid are astonishing.
Grid Allows You to Design Pages the Way that You Want
Using CSS Grid, you control the parameters of both rows and columns. This allows you to customize your website design with an absolute space between grid areas, or you can enable borders, spaces and design elements to shrink, expand, align, justify, wrap and stack. You can now set a fixed width for a grid and stretch the specific element across two or more rows. As you become more experienced with Grid, you can auto-place images, define as many parent-child rules as you like and create grids that use media queries to fill in the content in defined areas.
Check Out These Benefits of Using CSS Grid
The CSS Grid is a website design technique that is designed for creating unique layout properties such as type style, color, writing modes, positioning, alignment and even floats. The Grid works with other layout tools, so you can use it in just one area of your site. You gain these Web design benefits by using the CSS Grid:
- Design a dynamic Display Table.
- Start small on collaborative projects by using Progressive Enhancement features.
- Automate rows to determine their own height.
- Change the gap between columns easily.
- Choose your own number of columns instead of settling for the standard 12 columns.
- Set minimums and maximums for each design element, and let the browser do the math and figure out the display details.
Expand Your Design Options
Talented coders--and even beginners--can find tutorials on how to use the CSS Grid in specific areas of a website to enhance photo galleries and enable automated display features in responsive design. Contrary to common knowledge, learning the CSS Grid is not that difficult. You can get results quickly for about 80 percent of the Grid’s capabilities. You can take your time to learn about the other 20 percent while getting immediate results now.
You no longer need to choose every potential layout because the CSS Grid can make intelligent decisions to fill in the grid layout of your site based on the device and screen size that site visitors use. It’s easy to code your site to auto-place features where they’ll fit best in your overall Web design. This is not the same as using CSS frameworks like Foundation or Bootstrap--it’s a powerful layout tool for custom-designing an entire website or specific area of a website, and it works seamlessly with other layout tools.
