Centering in CSS

Follow 5 centering techniques as they go through a series of tests to see which one is the most resilient to change.

Dec 16, 2020

Available in: English, Русский, 日本語, and 한국어

Adam Argyle

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Centering in CSS is a notorious challenge, fraught with jokes and mockery. 2020 CSS is all grown up and now we can laugh at those jokes honestly, not through clenched teeth.

If you prefer video, here's a YouTube version of this post:

The challenge #

There are different types of centering. From differing use cases, number of things to center, etc. In order to demonstrate a rationale behind "a winning" centering technique, I created The Resilience Ringer. It's a series of stress tests for each centering strategy to balance within and you to observe their performance. At the end, I reveal the highest scoring technique, as well as a "most valuable." Hopefully you walk away with new centering techniques and solutions.

The Resilience Ringer #

The Resilience Ringer is a representation of my beliefs that a centering strategy should be resilient to international layouts, variable sized viewports, text edits and dynamic content. These tenets helped shape the following resilience tests for the centering techniques to endure:

1. Squished: centering should be able to handle changes to width
2. Squashed: centering should be able to handle changes to height
3. Duplicate: centering should be dynamic to number of items
4. Edit: centering should be dynamic to length and language of content
5. Flow: centering should be document direction and writing mode agnostic

The winning solution should demonstrate its resilience by keeping contents in center while being squished, squashed, duplicated, edited, and swapped to various language modes and directions. Trustworthy and resilient center, a safe center.

Legend #

I've provided some visual color hinting to help you keep some meta information in context:

• A pink border indicates ownership of centering styles
• The grey box is the background on the container which seeks to have centered items
• Each child has a white background color so you can see any effects the centering technique has on child box sizes (if any)

The 5 Contestants #

5 centering techniques enter the Resilience Ringer, only one will receive the Resilience Crown 👸.

1. Content Center #

1. Squish: great!
2. Squash: great!
3. Duplicate: great!
4. Edit: great!
5. Flow: great!

It's going to be hard to beat the conciseness of display: grid and the place-content shorthand. Since it centers and justifies children collectively, it's a solid centering technique for groups of elements meant to be read.

.content-center {
  display: grid;
  place-content: center;
  gap: 1ch;
}

Great for macro layouts containing paragraphs and headlines, prototypes, or generally things that need legible centering.

2. Gentle Flex #

1. Squish: great!
2. Squash: great!
3. Duplicate: great!
4. Edit: great!
5. Flow: great!

Gentle Flex is a truer centering-only strategy. It's soft and gentle, because unlike place-content: center, no children's box sizes are changed during the centering. As gently as possible, all items are stacked, centered, and spaced.

.gentle-flex {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
  gap: 1ch;
}

Great for both macro and micro layouts.

3. Autobot #

1. Squish: great
2. Squash: great
3. Duplicate: fine
4. Edit: great
5. Flow: great

The container is set to flex with no alignment styles, while the direct children are styled with auto margins. There's something nostalgic and wonderful about margin: auto working on all sides of the element.

.autobot {
  display: flex;
}
.autobot > * {
  margin: auto;
}

Great for centering icons or pseudo-elements.

4. Fluffy Center #

1. Squish: bad
2. Squash: bad
3. Duplicate: bad
4. Edit: great!
5. Flow: great! (so long as you use logical properties)

Contestant "fluffy center" is by far our tastiest sounding contender, and is the only centering technique that's entirely element/child owned. See our solo inner pink border!?

.fluffy-center {
  padding: 10ch;
}

Great for word or phrase-centric centering, tags, pills, buttons, chips, and more.

5. Pop & Plop #

1. Squish: okay
2. Squash: okay
3. Duplicate: bad
4. Edit: fine
5. Flow: fine

This "pops" because the absolute positioning pops the element out of normal flow. The "plop" part of the names comes from when I find it most useful: plopping it on top of other stuff. It's a classic and handy overlay centering technique that's flexible and dynamic to content size. Sometimes you just need to plop UI on top of other UI.

Great for modals, toasts and messages, stacks and depth effects, popovers.

The winner #

If I was on an island and could only have 1 centering technique, it would be…

[drum roll]

Gentle Flex 🎉

.gentle-flex {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
  gap: 1ch;
}

You can always find it in my stylesheets because it's useful for both macro and micro layouts. It's an all-around reliable solution with results that match my expectations. Also, because I'm an intrinsic sizing junkie, I tend to graduate into this solution. True, it's a lot to type out, but the benefits it provides outweighs the extra code.

MVP #

Fluffy Center

.fluffy-center {
  padding: 2ch;
}

Fluffy Center is so micro that it's easy to overlook as a centering technique, but it's a staple of my centering strategies. It's so atomic that sometimes I forget I'm using it.

Conclusion #

What types of things break your centering strategies? What other challenges could be added to the resilience ringer? I considered translation and an auto-height switch on the container… what else!?

Now that you know how I did it, how would you?! Let's diversify our approaches and learn all the ways to build on the web. Follow the codelab with this post to create your own centering example, just like the ones in this post. Tweet me your version, and I'll add it to the Community remixes section below.

Community remixes #

• CSS Tricks with a blog post