CSS Grid Item

— 5 minute read

We had our basic introduction into CSS Grid, The Grid Container, and today we are looking into the Grid Item.

HTML Structure

Let's start by making a grid template that is five by five.

<div class="grid">
  <!-- Row 1 -->
  <div class="item"></div>
  <div class="item"></div>
  <div class="item"></div>
  <div class="item"></div>
  <div class="item"></div>
  <!-- Row 2 -->
  ...
</div>

CSS Item

In our first introduction, we saw how to span an item over multiple blocks; let's dive deeper into that.

CSS Grid-column property

The property has multiple ways of describing the width of an item.

  • grid-column: 1 / 5;: Starts on column one end before column five
  • grid-column: 1 / span 3; Start on column one and span three columns
  • grid-column: 2 / span 3; Start on column two and span three columns
  • grid-column: span 3; Span three from wherever it starts

Have a look at this Codepen:

See the Pen CSS Grid Item Column by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

CSS Grid-row property

As like the grid-column, we can also use the grid-row to stack over rows.

  • grid-row: 1 / 4; Start on row one and end on row four
  • grid-row: 1 / span 2; Start on one and span two rows
  • grid-row: span 2; Span two from anywhere

See the Pen CSS Grid Item Row by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

CSS Grid-area

We can also make a grid-area to span both columns and rows.

grid-area: 1 / 2 / 5 / 6; Meaning: Start on Row 1, Column 2 and end at Row 5 Column 6

That will result in the following Codepen:

See the Pen CSS Grid Item Area by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

CSS Grid Naming Areas

Another cool feature, is we can name areas!

.grid {
  grid-template-areas: 'Custom Custom . . .' 'Custom Custom . . .';
}

This will make two rows, with the names Custom columns and three unnamed columns.

And then on our item:

.item {
  grid-area: Custom;
}

This will result in the following:

See the Pen CSS Grid Area by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Browser Support

CSS Grid has support from all major browsers, we have some issues in IE, but they can be Polyfilled.

CSS Grid support

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