Patrick Brosset
@patrickbrosset.com
CSS masonry (aka grid-lanes) has two orientations: rows and columns. I'm trying to think of good metaphors... Row is easy: a brick wall, that's where the masonry term comes from. Column: many call it waterfall, but trying to put it into an image doesn't work. Motorway works a lot better.
Jan 9, 2026 at 5:52 PM
Modernist tiles with CSS Grid
A Modernist hydraulic tile floor, one motif rotated across the whole room, is something you'll find everywhere in Barcelona. Let's build our own in CSS Grid. Six real motifs, a whole floor of palettes.
GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout
Learn all about the properties available in CSS Grid Layout through simple visual examples.
Multiple-column layout, rows, rules, and floats
Recently implemented in Chrome are two of my top asks for CSS—the concept of rows in multiple-column layout, and gap decorations for rows and columns in grid, flexbox, and multicol. Rows (using column-wrap) provide a way to use multicol on the web without risking scrolling up and down to read if the columns become taller than the viewport. Gap decorations mean that, for multicol, you can now add a rule between these new rows. This post is a collection of the things I think would be interesting to do in future. If you think so too, and particularly if you have a great use case for any of these, let me know in the comments.
CSS is filling the gaps with rules. A way to style gaps in grid and flex. | utilitybend
A practical walkthrough of CSS gap decorations: column-rule, row-rule, rule-break, rule-inset, rule-visibility-items, repeat(), and animation.
Let’s Play With Gap Decorations!
The `rule` (and friends) CSS property allows us to draw markers (like borders) in the gaps between columns and rows (and flex items!)
Extracting Grid Information Using CSS
It's an interesting and potentially useful trick to have an element know where it is on a grid. That's tricky enough when the items are in one row/column, but what about when they span?
Brickster — Build anything, together.
Build playful 3D brick creations with friends, then save them to your ATProto account.
CSS dot pattern/grid background
Islands Architecture - JASON Format
I’ve struggled to find references to this online, but heard the name used multiple times this year when describing the approach outlined here. To the best of my knowledge, the "Component Islands" pattern was coined by Etsy's frontend architect Katie Sylor-Miller during a meeting we had in 2019.
Animating CSS Grid Layouts with CSS Anchor Positioning
At CSS Day (back in June), someone asked me how Brave (the browser) might have built their New Tab Page which features some tiles laid out in a grid. While the grid is nothing spectacular, something special happens with it when you resize the viewport: as the available space changes, the grid nicely reorganizes itself in an animated way. The animations are also interruptible, so no View Transitions seem to be at play.So, how did they do it? I’m not sure. But if I were to recreate it, I’d use CSS Anchor Positioning with regular CSS Transitions on top.
Get Grid Information using pure CSS
With a few lines of code, you can get the number of columns, number of rows, and item coordinates
Four Corners — Daily Word Puzzle
Four Corners is a daily category-sorting puzzle. Twelve words, four categories around the board — and four corner words that belong to two at once.
Four Corners — Daily Word Puzzle
Four Corners is a daily category-sorting puzzle. Twelve words, four categories around the board — and four corner words that belong to two at once.
