Generate a CSS Grid with Stylus

By  on  

I've jumped into Stylus over the past few moths and I love it.  I wouldn't say it's better or worse than SASS, it's just something a bit different.  One task I've recently completed is building the standard Mozilla grid and column structure with a Stylus mixin.  Here's how I did it!

The CSS

The first step is setting up vars to represent the column start, stop, and increment sizes:

/* grid and site dimensions */
grid-increment-desktop = 80px
grid-increment-tablet = 60px
grid-increment-mobile = grid-increment-tablet

grid-start-desktop = 60px
grid-start-tablet = 40px
grid-start-mobile = grid-start-tablet

grid-end-desktop = 940px
grid-end-tablet = 700px
grid-end-mobile = 280px
grid-end-mobile-wide = 400px

site-width-desktop = 1000px
site-width-tablet = 760px
site-width-mobile = 320px
site-width-wide = 480px

/* media query dimensions */
/* obviously the default view doesn't require a media query */
media-query-tablet = 'only screen and (min-width: 760px) and (max-width: 1000px)'
media-query-mobile = 'only screen and (max-width: 760px)'
media-query-mobile-wide = 'only screen and (min-width: 480px) and (max-width: 760px)'

The grid widths will be need to be modified based on media query (device width) so we'll generate a general grid and then a media query-specific grid:

generate-grid(increment, start, end)
	total = start
	for n, x in 0..((end - start) / increment)
		.column-{x+1}
			width total
		total = total + increment


/* and now to generate the grids... */


/* Desktop Layout (default) */
generate-grid(grid-increment-desktop, grid-start-desktop, grid-end-desktop)


/* Tablet Layout - 760px */
@media media-query-tablet
	generate-grid(grid-increment-tablet, grid-start-tablet, grid-end-tablet)

/* Mobile Layout - 320px */
@media media-query-mobile
	generate-grid(grid-increment-mobile, grid-start-mobile, grid-end-mobile)

 /* Wide Mobile Layout - 480px */
@media media-query-mobile-wide
	generate-grid(grid-increment-mobile, grid-start-mobile, grid-end-mobile-wide)

The result looks like this:

.column-1 {
  width: 60px;
}
.column-2 {
  width: 140px;
}
.column-3 {
  width: 220px;
}
.column-4 {
  width: 300px;
}
.column-5 {
  width: 380px;
}
.column-6 {
  width: 460px;
}
.column-7 {
  width: 540px;
}
.column-8 {
  width: 620px;
}
.column-9 {
  width: 700px;
}
.column-10 {
  width: 780px;
}
.column-11 {
  width: 860px;
}
.column-12 {
  width: 940px;
}
@media only screen and (min-width: 760px) and (max-width: 1000px) {
  .column-1 {
    width: 40px;
  }
  .column-2 {
    width: 100px;
  }
  /* ... */
}
@media only screen and (max-width: 760px) {
  /* ... */
}
@media only screen and (min-width: 480px) and (max-width: 760px) {
  /* ... */
}

I love how easy it is to create these grids using CSS preprocessors and I hope CSS eventually makes it to the dynamic level.  SASS and Stylus proves that the system works and I pray we get a standard soon!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fancy Navigation with MooTools JavaScript

    Navigation menus are traditionally boring, right? Most of the time the navigation menu consists of some imagery with a corresponding mouseover image. Where's the originality? I've created a fancy navigation menu that highlights navigation items and creates a chain effect. The XHTML Just some simple...

  • By
    Fade Images with MooTools LazyLoad

    I recently received an email from a MooTools developer asking a great question about my LazyLoad class: "I'm using your LazyLoad MooTools plugin (which is great, by the way). I have been trying to figure out how to modify it so that once an image scrolls into...

Discussion

  1. But PX and not %?

    • That did surprise me too, Dan. I’m going to push around Mozilla to see why pixel-based design is the standard. The nice thing, however, is that we can modify this mixin/function for percentages

    • Jamie

      pixel based design is a standard because of advertisements. Trying to always have a 300×250 ad in a sidebar doesn’t work too well with percentage based grids.

  2. darksapito

    nice article, thanks! :D

    take a look tuktuk.tapquo.com is a framework using stylus

    the ‘nib’ module of stylus is great :D

  3. I still would go with SASS. Nice mixin though. tuktuk looks interesting …

  4. Loc_rabbirt

    thanks you :), great article

  5. Alex

    codepen unfortunately does not support stylus, an alternative would be cssdeck

  6. Good to see a fellow Stylus user! Here is a responsive grid system I wrote in Stylus using a loop over a 12 column grid: https://github.com/stinoga/columnus

    • my man Rob I thought about when I saw the article title… I’m digging columnus. Cheers :)

    • Thanks Ady! I’d love any feedback you’ve got on it.

  7. Great to see, very similar to a grid system I use without pre processors.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!