Center aligning content with CSS and flex-box

Many a time I noticed that people find it very difficult to align content to the center either vertically or horizontally using CSS 😐. So I decided to write a few ways of aligning content to the center using CSS 😃.

Center aligning text in CSS.

So let's start with the easy one aligning text to the center of the screen. To do this just use the style text-align:center on the specific tag you want to align the text to the center.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>center align content</title>
    </head>
    <body>

    <h1 style="text-align: center;">🍔 is center aligned</h1>
    <p>🍒 still in left</p>

    </body>
</html>

aligning content to the center

Now let's get into a little complicated stuff. Aligning a div or any content to the center. So the trick is using margin:auto and giving a specific width to the div. This will get the div aligned horizontally center to the parent element.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>center align content</title>
    </head>
    <style>
        body{
            margin: 0;
        }
        .box{
            height:25rem;
            background-color: blueviolet;
            width: 25rem;
            margin: auto;
        }
    </style>
    <body>
            <div class="box"></div>
    </body>
</html>

To align an image to the center for an img tag you need to just add one more CSS property that is display:block.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>center align content</title>
    </head>
    <style>
        body{
            margin: 0;
        }
        .imgCenter{
            display: block;
            background-color: blueviolet;
            margin: auto;
        }
    </style>
    <body>
            <img class="imgCenter" src="https://i.chzbgr.com/full/7588073728/h78549C5D/not-sure-if-i-hate-css-or-i-hate-designers"/>
    </body>
</html>

Suppose you want to align a div both vertically and horizontally to the center of the parent element then you can do that with the below code.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.centerBox {
  margin: 0;
  position: absolute;
  background-color: blue;
  height:15rem;
  width:15rem;
  top: 50%;
  left:50%;
  -ms-transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
  transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
  <div class="centerBox"></div>
</body>
</html>

Using flex to align content to the center

A still better way of aligning content to the center is by using the flex properties.

Suppose you want to align a div horizontally to the center of the parent element. Then you need to apply the display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; properties to the parent element.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>center align content</title>
    </head>
    <style>
        body{
            margin: 0;
        }
        .container {
            display: flex;
            align-items: center;
            justify-content: center;
        }

        .box{
            width: 100px;
            height: 100px;
            background-color: blueviolet;
        }
      
    </style>
    <body>
          <div class="container">
              <div class="box"></div>
          </div>  
    </body>
</html>

Suppose you want to vertically and horizontally align a div to the center of the parent element then you need to add the following style to html and body tag.

html, body { height: 100%; } and give some height to the parent element.

That's it your content should be vertically and horizontally aligned to the parent element. The below snippet shows how a div can be aligned to the center.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>center align content</title>
    </head>
    <style>
        html, body {
            height: 100%;
        }
        body{
            margin: 0;
        }
        .container {
            height: 100%;
            display: flex;
            align-items: center;
            justify-content: center;
        }

        .box{
            width: 100px;
            height: 100px;
            background-color: blueviolet;
        }
      
    </style>
    <body>
          <div class="container">
              <div class="box"></div>
          </div>  
    </body>
</html>

Congrats we are at the end of this post. I hope you enjoyed the topic.