Masonry Layout with Flexbox in CSS (Example)

You need to master both Flexbox and CSS Grid in order to professionally build modern websites & web apps. If you haven't mastered both of them yet, I highly recommend going through my CSS Course.

Let's try creating this layout with CSS:

How it works:

1. There is a parent element and 7 child elements. We give each child element a width of 400px and each one will get a different height.

2. By setting display to flex on the parent element, we 'unlock' the Flexbox functionalities. This parent element automatically becomes the so-called flex-container and its direct child elements become the so-called flex-items.

3. The default behavior is that all child elements will be laid out horizontally along a row. They may even flow out of the flex-container. To prevent it from overflowing the container, use flex-wrap and set it to wrap.

4. This horizontal / row direction will not allow us to create a masonry layout properly, so we need to change the flex-direction to column.

5. Now we just want to center all flex items horizontally in the container. Usually the align-items and align-content properties are for the vertical direction, but since we set flex-direction to column, that switches to the horizontal direction. In this case we want to use the align-content property because there are multiple columns, if we only had 1 column we could use the align-items property.

By the way, I think CSS is the 'bottleneck' to most websites & web apps. I believe it's the highest-ROI skill you can master.

Before I mastered CSS, I lost a ton of time & energy fiddling around with CSS.

I was learning about advanced JavaScript topics when I couldn't even implement basic layouts in CSS...

So I created a CSS course to help you avoid the same mistake. Check it out here if you're interested.

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