How to create beautiful flexbox layout using CSS

Grid layouts are the bread and butter of web development design and chances are you've reached for something like Bootstrap or Foundation to make your layouts a reality. But, like most of you, I don't have a fondness of the dependencies required to run Bootstrap or Foundation nor do I like the ding to my page load times.

In fact when I use Bootstrap for an application that I am writing, I really almost only ever use it for the grid layouts, sometimes I will use it for notifications or basic fairly sensible CSS defaults, but 90% of the time, all I want is the grid layouts.

I also don't appreciate only have options of splitting columns into 12 columns or less. It feels like you sometimes have to do some crazy work arounds to get columns in columns, or strange things like that.

How can we do grid layouts faster and easier? Flexbox is your answer. I think.

Layout

First I wrap the entire page in a div.

Then I define a .row and .column class that can help with the layout.

.row {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  width: 100%;
}

.column {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  flex-basis: 100%;
  flex: 1;
}

Now if we want a two column layout:

<div class='some-page-wrapper'>
  <div class='row'>
    <div class='column'>
      <div class='blue-column'>
        Some Text in Column One
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class='column'>
      <div class='green-column'>
        Some Text in Column Two
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

The CSS looks like:

.some-page-wrapper {
  margin: 15px;
  background-color: red;
}

.row {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  width: 100%;
}

.column {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  flex-basis: 100%;
  flex: 1;
}

.blue-column {
  background-color: blue;
  height: 100px;
}

.green-column {
  background-color: green;
  height: 100px;
}