CSS Grid Challenge: Winners and Templates

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new layout standard for the web, and we are all still experimenting with what we can achieve with it. CSS Grid is becoming thefor the web, and we are all still experimenting with what we can achieve with it.

One of the main reasons behind the idea of the CSS Grid Challenge was to have some starting points for layouts, and show what can be achieved with CSS Grids today. Well, we received some many great submissions that it was really hard to choose the one winner — there are so many submissions who deserve to win first place.

While the browser support for CSS Grid is really good already, it isn’t supported in the older browser versions. That’s why we challenged you to implement fallbacks for browsers that don’t support CSS Grid just yet, and most of the submissions were doing fine in that regard. Falling back to floats and Flexbox isn’t hard, but still not all submissions were providing fallbacks for browsers that don’t support CSS Grid. We had to deduct some points in these cases, unfortunately.

So without a further ado, let’s look at the submissions which we think are the most impressive ones:

? The Winner Of The CSS Grid Challenge 2017 Is… James Clarke!

James Clarke’s CSS-only The Deck (download the template, ZIP, 1.3MB) is particularly well suited for a linear narrative that you might find in presentations or marketing pages. What we think was particularly interesting is the cross-horizontal way to navigate between the different pages. Also, we like the use of lots of whitespace, so that the focus of each page remains perfectly obvious.

Please keep in mind: This template isn’t keyboard-accessible and we’re working with James to improve it.

On smaller devices, the template turns into a regular layout, and it falls back graciously on browsers that don’t support CSS Grid. Ladies and Gents, a big round of applause for the winner of the CSS Grid challenge!

Insights from James himself:

"As CSS grid layout is new technology and sits atop many other advances that have been built into CSS, I chose to limit myself to see what I could build with HTML and CSS alone. I elected to rebuild an old website from about 10years ago that was built using the then-popular "MooTools" javascript library. That library opened up the ease of cross-browser javascript development at the time, and the advance in CSS's capabilities seemed to offer a similar possibility. The result of my efforts I call "Deck". It is a format that is particularly well suited to the sort of linear narrative that you might find in a power-point presentation, or marketing pages. The standard these days is a long-scrolling page. That format works well of course, but it is undifferentiated, and we've been stuck with it for years now. I wanted to explore something a bit different, in hopes of finding a new way." Features: CSS only, no javascript. All interactions flow from native browser functions and CSS pseudo-selectors like :checked, :target. CSS Grid Layout: horizontal and vertical positioning, source re-ordering, adaptation to different viewports. Progressive-enhancement, responsive layouts: Smaller screen devices and older browsers receive a format catered to their needs and technologies. Touch friendly: All UI functions play well with touch-screen laptops/tablets/phones. Back/Forward button navigation: Back and forward buttons remain functional where browser support exists (current issues with MS Edge repainting when not initiated by javascript 'hash-change' event).

But Wait… There’s More!

We received a number of really impressive submissions and so we decided to give out a silver as well as a bronze medal, too!

? Second Place: Frida Nyvall

The second place goes to The Daily Prophet, a fictional newspaper for wizards built with Grid. It’s a great example for multi-column layouts that respond to smaller screen sizes. You can tell that the creator put a lot of effort into building this page with its subtle animations, using CSS Shapes, and a very thoughtful transformation of layout throughout all the different screen sizes. The only downside here is that the submission is not working in browsers that don’t support CSS Grid.