Layoutit Grid: Learning CSS Grid Visually With a Generator

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Layoutit Grid is an interactive open source CSS Grid generator. It lets you draw your designs and see the code as you go. You can interact with the code, add or remove track lines and drag them around to change the sizing — and you get to see the CSS and HTML change in real time!

When you are done with a layout, you can create a CodePen or grab the code to jumpstart your next project. The tool brings the code to the forefront, helping you learn CSS grid as you work directly with it.

CSS Grid is a whole new way of thinking about layouts

We can now create robust responsive layouts for our web experiences. We can finally learn to design with a coherent set of layout tools instead of memorizing piles of hacks to force elements into position.

Now, I’m not saying a generator like this excuses us from knowing the code we write. We should all learn how CSS Grid and Flexbox work. Even if your stronghold is JavaScript, having a solid foundation in CSS knowledge is a powerful ally when communicating your ideas. When sharing a prototype for a component, a UX interaction, or even an algorithm in an online sandbox, the way in which your work is presented can make a big the difference. The ability to develop proper layouts — and define the styles that create them — is fundamental.

Crafting layouts in CSS should not be a daunting task. CSS Grid is actually quite fun to use! For example, using named grid areas feels like an ASCII art version of drawing a design on a piece of paper. Lets create the layout of a photos app, a feed of pics and the people in them side by side for its main content and the typical header, footer and a config sidebar.

.photos-app {
  /* For our app layout, lets place things in a grid */
  display: grid;
  /* We want 3 columns and 3 rows, and these are the responsive
     track sizes using `fr` (fraction of the remaining space) */
  grid-template-columns: 20% 1fr 1fr;
  grid-template-rows: 0.5fr 1.7fr 0.3fr;
  /* Let's separate our tracks a bit */
  gap: 1em;
  /* We now have 3x3 cells, here is where each section is placed */
  grid-template-areas:
    "header header header"  /* a header stretching in the top row */
    "config photos people"  /* a left sidebar, and our app content */
    "footer footer footer"; /* and a footer along the bottom row  */
}


.the-header {
  /* In each section, let's define the name we use to refence the area */
  grid-area: "header";
}

This is just a small subset of what you can build with CSS Grid. The spec is quite flexible. Areas can also be placed directly using line numbers or names, or they can be placed implicitly by the browser, with the content distributed inside the grid automatically. And the spec continues to grow with additions, like subgrid.

At the same time, working with grids can be difficult, just like anything that requires a new way of thinking. It takes a lot of time to wrap our heads around this sort of thing. And one way to help do that is to…

Learn while playing

When you are learning CSS Grid, it is easy to feel intimidated by its notation and semantics. Until you develop some muscle memory for it, kickstarting the learning process with visual and interactive tools can be an excellent way to overcome that early trepidation. A lot of us have used generators while learning how to create shadows, gradients, Markdown tables, and so on. Generators, if built with care, are great learning aids.

Let’s use Layoutit Grid to recreate the same design in our example.

Generators like this aren’t meant to be leaned on forever; they’re a stepping stone. This particular one helps you experience the power of CSS Grid by materializing your designs in a few clicks along with the code to make it happen. This gives you the early wins that you need to push forward with the learning process. For some of us, generators permanently remain in our toolboxes. Not because we do not know how to craft the layouts by hand, but because having the visual feedback loop help us to quickly convert our ideas into code. So we keep playing with them.

Sarah Drasner has also created a CSS Grid generator that’s worth checking out as well.

Learn by building

Leniolabs recently open-sourced Layoutit Grid and added new features, like interactive code views, area edition, history and offline support. And there are several more in the making.

If you have ideas to improve the tool, get in touch! Open an issue and let’s discuss it on GitHub. Going into meta territory, you can also learn about the CSS Grid spec by helping us build the tool. 

We use the app to keep track of best practices in creating performant interactive web experiences. It is now powered by the newly released Vue 3 using <script setup> components and built with Vite, a new dev tool that doesn’t bundle the app while developing, which gives us instant feedback during development. If you are curious and want to build with us, fork the repo and let’s learn together!

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