How to Build a News Website Layout with Flexbox

It’s not necessary to understand every aspect of Flexbox before you can jump in and get started. In this tutorial, we’re going to introduce a few features of Flexbox whilst designing a “news layout” like the one you can find on The Guardian.

The reason we’re using Flexbox is that it provides very powerful features:

• we can easily make responsive columns
• we can make columns of equal height
• we can push content to the bottom of a container

So let’s get started!

1. Start with Two Columns

Creating columns in CSS has always been a challenge. For a long time, the only options were to use floats or tables, but they both had their own issues.

Flexbox makes the process easier, giving us:

• cleaner code: we only need a container with display: flex
• no need to clear floats, preventing unexpected layout behavior
• semantic markup
• flexibility: we can resize, stretch, align the columns in a few lines of CSS

Let’s start by making two columns; one that’s 2/3 of the width of our container, and one that’s 1/3.

<div class="columns">
  <div class="column main-column">
    2/3 column
  </div>
  <div class="column">
    1/3 column
  </div>
</div>

There are two elements here:

1. the columns container
2. two column children, one with an additional class of main-column which we’ll use to make it wider

.columns {
  display: flex;
}

.column {
  flex: 1;
}

.main-column {
  flex: 2;
}

As the main column has a flex value of 2, it will take up twice as much space as the other column.

By adding some additional visual styles, here’s what we get:

2. Make Each Column a Flexbox Container

Each of these two columns will contain several articles stacked vertically, so we’re going to turn the column elements into Flexbox containers too. We want:

• the articles to be stacked vertically
• the articles to stretch and fill the available space

.column {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column; /* Makes the articles stacked vertically */
}

.article {
  flex: 1; /* Stretches the articles to fill up the remaining space */
}

The flex-direction: column rule on the container, combined with the flex: 1 rule on the children ensures that the articles will fill up the whole vertical space, keeping our first two columns the same height.

3. Make Each Article a Flexbox Container

Now, to give us extra control, let’s turn each article into a Flexbox container too. Each of them will contain:

• a title
• a paragraph
• an information bar with the author and the number of comments
• an optional responsive image

We’re using Flexbox here in order to “push” the information bar to the bottom. As a reminder, this is the article layout we’re aiming for:

Here’s the code:

<a class="article first-article">
  <figure class="article-image">
    <img src="http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/">
  </figure>
  <div class="article-body">
    <h2 class="article-title">
      <!-- title -->
    </h2>
    <p class="article-content">
      <!-- content -->
    </p>
    <footer class="article-info">
      <!-- information -->
    </footer>
  </div>
</a>

.article {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  flex-basis: auto; /* sets initial element size based on its contents  */
}

.article-body {
  display: flex;
  flex: 1;
  flex-direction: column;
}

.article-content {
  flex: 1; /* This will make the content fill up the remaining space, and thus push the information bar at the bottom */
}

The article’s elements are laid out vertically thanks to the flex-direction: column; rule.

We apply flex: 1 to the article-content element so that it fills up the empty space, and “pushes” the article-info to the bottom, no matter the height of the columns.

4. Add Some Nested Columns

In the left column, what we actually want is another set of columns. So we’re going to replace the second article with the same columns container we’ve already used.

<div class="columns">
  <div class="column nested-column">
    <a class="article">
      <!-- Article content -->
    </a>
  </div>

  <div class="column">
    <a class="article">
      <!-- Article content -->
    </a>
    <a class="article">
      <!-- Article content -->
    </a>
    <a class="article">
      <!-- Article content -->
    </a>
  </div>
</div>

As we want the first nested column to be wider, we’re adding a nested-column class with the additional style:

.nested-column {
  flex: 2;
}

This will make our new column twice as wide as the other.

5. Give the First Article a Horizontal Layout

.first-article {
  flex-direction: row;
}

.first-article .article-body {
  flex: 1;
}

.first-article .article-image {
  height: 300px;
  order: 2;
  padding-top: 0;
  width: 400px;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 800px) {
  .columns,
  .column {
    display: flex;
  }
}

@media screen and (min-width: 1000px) {
  .first-article {
    flex-direction: row;
  }

  .first-article .article-body {
    flex: 1;
  }

  .first-article .article-image {
    height: 300px;
    order: 2;
    padding-top: 0;
    width: 400px;
  }

  .main-column {
    flex: 3;
  }

  .nested-column {
    flex: 2;
  }
}