c/css-grid-tricks

Switched to named grid lines after a client kept asking for layout changes on every call

They told me 'just drag the boxes around' and I realized my numbered lines were confusing everyone, so now I use - sidebar and - main labels and it's way easier to explain to non-coders.

Hot take: I stopped using Flexbox after seeing a dev's conference talk in Austin last fall

Saw this guy from a big news site show how they do their whole homepage with just CSS Grid. No flex fallbacks, no media query mess. I was skeptical but tried it on a client project in October. Layouts I used to fight with for hours just worked. The talk was at Frontend Conf in September. Has anyone else dropped Flexbox completely or am I being too extreme?

Warning: subgrid broke my layout for 2 days before I figured it out

Last month I was building a product card grid for a shop in Austin. I used subgrid for the first time to align the text rows across 12 cards. Looked great in Firefox but broke completely in Chrome. Turns out Chrome was treating the subgrid parent height differently. I had to set an explicit height on the parent grid item to make it work across browsers. Still not sure if subgrid is ready for production projects. Has anyone else hit this cross-browser mess with subgrid?

Finally tried auto-fit vs auto-fill in CSS Grid and auto-fill made my layout way less broken on those weird tablet sizes

I spent 3 hours debugging why my gallery was leaving huge gaps on an iPad mini and switching from grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, ...) to auto-fill fixed it instantly because auto-fill keeps those empty columns in place, has anyone else run into this specific gotcha or is it just me?

Hot take: An old coworker made me rethink my whole approach to grid gaps

I was talking to this guy Dave I used to work with at a web shop in Austin, and he said using gap: 0 and then adding margin to individual items is way more flexible than relying on grid's built-in gap property. At first I thought he was crazy, but after trying it on a dashboard for a client's stats page, I saw how much easier it was to control spacing for nested grids. Has anyone else experimented with ditching grid gaps for manual spacing?

Talked to a dev at a meetup who changed how I do overlapping grids

I was at a small web dev meetup in Portland last Tuesday, and this frontend guy named Sam showed me how he layers grid items using z-index and negative margins instead of absolute positioning. I always thought overlapping stuff in CSS Grid was hacky or needed JS. He pulled up his personal site on his laptop and had a photo grid where every other tile overlapped by 30px, and it looked clean as hell. That demo hit different because he walked me through the code line by line and showed it worked on mobile first. Has anyone else tried overlapping grid items like that, or do you stick to separate wrapper divs?

Chose CSS Grid over flexbox for my portfolio rebuild and it was a mixed bag

Ngl, I went with a full grid layout for my site's main page last month but ended up fighting with it for two days on mobile breakpoints, so how did you guys handle responsive grid layouts without going crazy on media queries?

Grid vs Flexbox for a blog layout I was rebuilding last night

I rebuilt my personal blog layout in CSS Grid after years of using Flexbox and the alignment control feels way better, but I'm wondering if the extra markup and browser support headaches are actually worth it for something that worked fine before has anyone else switched back after trying Grid for a while?

Appreciation post: finally using grid-template-areas in my dashboard layout

I used to build data dashboards with flexbox nested inside float layouts, which meant constant margin tweaks every time a client wanted a new widget. Last month I moved a whole inventory panel to grid-template-areas and it snapped into place with zero media query headaches. Has anyone else found that named grid areas make rearranging content way less painful than old-school methods?

Wasted $200 on a crappy grid framework before realizing CSS Grid was already there

Back in 2018 I bought some premium grid framework for like $200 thinking it would speed up my layouts. Spent a whole weekend reading the docs and setting it up, only to discover it broke on mobile half the time. Then I actually learned proper CSS Grid and realized the framework was just doing a worse version of what I could write in 10 lines. Has anyone else bought into a paid layout tool that ended up being useless?

Subgrid broke my whole layout when I tried to nest it 3 levels deep

I was building this product grid for a client in Chicago last Tuesday and thought subgrid would be clever. Three levels deep, the rows just ignored my heights completely and the whole thing collapsed into a mess. Had to rip it all out and use plain old grid with explicit row definitions instead. Has anyone else had subgrid fail on them like this?

Overheard a designer say "grids are for control freaks" and it made me rethink my whole process

They were talking about how they just let content float with flexbox and spacing, never using explicit grid columns, and I gotta admit their sites had way more breathing room. Does anyone here intentionally skip grid for certain projects?

Saw a restaurant menu board that changed how I think about grid spacing

I stopped for lunch at a diner outside Flagstaff last week and their menu board caught my eye. Every item was in a grid with uneven gutters that made it look chaotic and hard to read. That moment convinced me that consistent gap sizing isn't just a technical choice, it really affects how people use a layout. Has anyone else had a real world experience that changed their approach to grid spacing?

Just realized I was doing my gap trick totally backwards

I've been using CSS Grid for maybe 2 years now, and I always placed my gap values inside the grid container as a shorthand. Like grid-gap: 20px. It worked fine so I never questioned it. Then last week I was watching a tutorial on grid patterns and the guy put gap: 20px on a child element instead of the parent. I literally paused the video and stared at my screen for a minute. Turns out you can set gaps on individual grid items using grid-column-gap and grid-row-gap separately. I had been fighting with nested containers to make different spacing between rows and columns. Now I can just set a 10px row gap on some items and a 30px column gap on others. Has anyone else found a basic grid property they ignored forever only to discover it later?

I finally tried named grid lines over numbers

I used to argue grid numbers were fine. Then I had to modify a 3-month old layout and spent 20 minutes counting columns. Named lines saved me that headache in under a minute.

TIL one CSS Grid property can totally replace float layouts for good

I stumbled on `grid-template-areas` in a Twitter thread from Rachel Andrew last week and it honestly made me rethink every messy float layout I ever hacked together, has anyone else dumped floats entirely for this approach?

The day I realized I was nesting CSS Grid containers wrong for months

I kept getting these weird gaps in my layout and couldn't figure out why until a coworker glanced at my code and pointed out I was using margin instead of gap on the child elements. Has anyone else accidentally mixed up grid gap with margin and spent hours debugging?

Tried that $200 CSS Grid course from the big name developer, total waste of time

I mean it was basically just rearranging the MDN docs into videos. Paid $200 for maybe 20 minutes of actual new info. Everything else was stuff you can find in free tutorials on YouTube. I got through it in like 3 days and felt robbed. Has anyone else bought a pricey course that just rehashed free material?

Found a neat trick for grid areas on responsive layouts

Was messing around with a 3 column layout for a blog and kept running into issues with how articles stacked on mobile. I read a post by some dev who used `grid-template-areas` with media queries to literally rearrange the boxes instead of rewriting the whole thing. Has anyone else found a smooth way to handle that kind of shift without making a mess of the code?

That day I finally got CSS Grid to do exactly what I wanted

Spent like 4 hours last Saturday wrestling with a grid layout for a client dashboard and it finally clicked when I used grid-template-areas instead of fighting with column spans lol. Has anyone else had that moment where a Grid property just suddenly makes sense after hours of trial and error?

Grid vs Flexbox for a dashboard layout, picked Grid and it was way smoother

I was building a client dashboard for a local coffee shop owner last weekend. Had to show sales numbers, inventory alerts, and upcoming orders in a responsive layout. I sat there for like 20 minutes debating if I should use Flexbox or CSS Grid for the main section. Flexbox felt safer since I know it better. But I went with Grid and used grid-template-areas to map out the blocks. Everything snapped into place first try. No weird margin hacks or calc() nonsense. Has anyone else had a moment where Grid just felt like the obvious choice even though Flexbox could work?

Three years ago I built a full site using only floats, felt like a hero until I saw what Grid could do last month.

I redid that same site with CSS Grid in 2 hours versus the 3 days it took me with floats. The column alignment on the product cards alone saved me 20 lines of media queries. Has anyone else gone back and rebuilt old projects just to see the time difference?

A designer told me my CSS grid had too many columns and I got defensive until I actually tried it

I was building out a product catalog page for a client and had like 8 columns in my grid because I wanted to show 4 different breakpoints with all these gaps. This senior designer I work with took one look and said 'your grid is fighting itself, drop it to 3 max and use subgrid for the inner stuff.' I figured it would break everything but I tried it on a test branch and it actually made the whole layout way cleaner, especially on tablet. Has anyone else gotten feedback that forced them to simplify their grid approach?

I was at the An Event Apart conference in Chicago when I saw a talk that made me drop flexbox for good.

The speaker, Rachel Andrew, showed how to build a full magazine layout with CSS Grid in about 20 lines of code. She used `grid-template-areas` to map out the whole page visually, something that would have taken me 50 lines of messy flexbox hacks. I went home and rebuilt my main project site that week, cutting my layout CSS in half. Has anyone else fully switched from flexbox to grid for page-level layouts, or do you still mix them?

My brother-in-law told me to 'just use flexbox' for a gallery layout and I'm glad I ignored him