17 Free CSS Layouts for User Interface Designers 2023

Here are the most versatile CSS layouts for your web development project.

How do websites get all those interesting content alignments, colors, and flexibility? It’s because of CSS! Think of CSS as the suit of the web. It’s that extra coating on the cake to make it look wonderful. And while we can’t taste the web, we can enjoy it to the fullest when designers take their time to provide unique, ambitious and stellar web browsing experiences. Getting started with CSS was never easier; now there are hundreds of books, frameworks and coding websites that provide onboard experience for understanding how the web is styled. The best part is that you can contribute to those styling efforts!

So without further ado, we’re giving you 15 of the most versatile CSS layouts built by CSS veterans. These designs and layouts are read-to-use for your projects, or solely to understand how layouts work. It’s a wonderful collection of layouts that will inspire you as you realize how much CSS has progressed and how a slight addition of interactive JS codes can make all the difference. At the very bottom, we included some famous CSS layout frameworks to help you style a responsive and modern layout in no time.

Best CSS Layouts For Your Website

1. Pure.css

With all those beautiful CSS layouts we looked at, you still realize something is missing. You could place the web elements and components to create a fully functional website. Sure, coding them is possible, but why waste time when you’ve got frameworks like Pure? Pure provides you with several layout options itself. These include blogs, emails, photos galleries, landing pages, pricing tables, side menus, and other menus.

You can stitch these layouts together and begin building a unique web design. The components that come with Pure are grids, buttons, tables, forms, and menus. All of these effortlessly flow as you put them all together. Including Pure and writing some CSS ensures that your site or app properly works across browsers. It will even look truly unique. Best of all, your CSS file size will remain tiny. This feature is great for mobile users and others with slow connections.

2. Colorlib CSS Website Layouts

Colorlib has the largest library of CSS layouts, with over 2,500 layout from a simple blog to vendor marketplaces and membership websites. All the layouts are made with performance in mind.

3. Expanding Column Layout

Ettrics is a small digital design agency in Canada. Two guys manage this little agency and have created incredible works of art that thousands of designers worldwide have recognized. They’ve also shared some cool CSS snippets in the past, like Hexagon animations, slider animations, menu overlays, drag and drop interfaces, and interactive bar graphs — adding up to 100,000+ views in total.

They’re also not shy about writing and sharing tutorials with the community. They have extensively written about how designers can create user interface kits and appealing user experiences using good design understanding. The developers also built this layout called Expanding Column Layout. Audiences viewed this layout more than 30,000+ times already. Once you access this layout, you will see a simple page layout perfect for portfolios that shows different color columns, and expands each column individually. Within the expanding window you can put in any content that you like.

4. Fullscreen Layout with Columns

Karol Podlesny has taken the work of Ettrics and changed up the schematics a little bit. You also get a different set of colors, and slightly more optimized expanding windows for sharing content. Worth sharing to save time from managing colors individually! Moreover, it’s full screen and gracefully adapts to mobile devices.

5. Susy

Susy is a powerhouse of a framework that does all of the hard work. It can put your ideas and design patterns together into a single layout.

6. Static Page Layout Example

Nick Pettit is an exceptional game developer who happens to be one of the in-house course teachers at Treehouse, world-famous developer learning resource. What Nick has built here with this layout is an example of how a static website layout functions, and how you can use such a static layout to build prototypes without necessarily having to put in the hours to provide a flawless functioning demo.

7. Product Page Layout with Flexbox

The official team behind Angular.js is also actively sharing different snippets and code structures to create particular layouts. And such, Angular Material is giving the community a solid Flexbox layout for product pages. The developers packed this theme with individual product grids, for featured and ordinary product displays. They also gave this product the ability to sort and filter results. Wonderful results altogether. This gives you a taste of what to expect in the new Angular framework amplified with the Material Design spec.

8. Beautiful CSS3 Layout

Adrian Gyuricska has produced a very neat little CSS layout ideal for hosting a portfolio page, but could essentially be converted into a single page blog layout. What we like the most is the smooth sidebar enriched with links, and the colorful element layout divided into different sections. There is also a little bit of JavaScript action happening, and the template is styled with Jade and SCSS.

9. Flexbox Grid Layout with Mobile Menu

Lindsey Di Napoli is behind CSSgirl — a portfolio / resource project that depicts her career as a front-end designer. She’s built some cool stuff in her time, and the Flexbox Grid Layout (with a supported mobile navigation) is one of her best works to date, at least in terms of free sharing; we’re sure she has worked on some truly inspiring project in the past herself. So either way, this layout again shows how you can use Flexbox to create an aesthetic and perfectly aligned design. We like cards within the content areas, with neat little overlays that display social sharing buttons.

10. Responsive Card Layout with Flexbox

Mynor Alexander can teach you a few things about Flexbox and card layouts; you don’t need to see him in person! It’s all right within the source code of this Responsive Card Layout built using Flexbox. Nowadays, the adaption of card layouts is continuously growing; their value for design experience is invaluable. And so, it goes without saying that learning how to use cards in design as a front-end developer will be quintessential for progressing to the future of web design.

11. CSS Only Responsive Layout with Smooth Transitions

Ying Zhang works with several big brands as a web developer and hosts her project Pure Essence to discuss her progress in her career. Among the snippets she has shared, you’ll find this pure CSS layout with a supported smooth transition, all fully and completely responsive. The transitions happen through a menu selection at the bottom of the page. Once you click on an item, a new page rolls open with a smooth transition. Furthermore, you can customize each page aspect to fit your requirements. Lovely example of how to build interactivity on the web.

12. Grid with Layouts

This is yet another share from Angular Material; this time, they share a simple grid layout that you can use as a boilerplate for future design development. Keep an eye on their CodePen page as they continue to push out new layouts and concepts in preparation for the full release of Angular framework.

13. Flexbox Article Layout

Jon Daiello has worked on many great projects involving product design and development. Here in this layout, he showed us just how flexible Flexbox can be when structuring a layout for content. Whether for magazine or blog articles, with Flexbox it is possible to attain that crisp quality that you won’t find elsewhere. This Responsive Article Layout is built to resemble a traditional content layout within a grid. This is the same layout Jon uses on his website, which is another saying he trusts his work. The header and the footer areas could use a little bit of improvement, and perhaps all you need to take away from this layout is the actual structure of the grid itself.

14. Responsive Vertical Timeline

CodyHouse is a free library of ready-to-use and easy-to-customize code snippets. CodyHouse releases a new snippet or a script, accompany it with their tutorials and guides. These guides and tutorials can show you how the code works and achieve the final results. In this example, we have a Responsive Vertical Timeline layout. You can use it ideally on business websites or portfolios where you want to showcase how much you progressed. It would be unusual to see this design in magazines. But, you can get away with certain blog type sites using a timeline layout. Those who publish the latest business updates and news can also utilize this feature.

15. Fixed Daily Kitteh

The WCC, also known as Women’s Coding Collective, is a community of developers strictly aimed at helping women. WCC empowers them through writing code. It can bridge the gap between the gender roles in web development communities today. WCC provides women with guidance and resources on starting their careers as developers. This Daily Kitteh layout example is just one of the examples of the kind of work that WCC offers for learning. Women can learn how to structure a nice and static website page. WCC can also let them understand how all elements cooperate for the final result.

16. Spotify Artist Page UI

Adam Lowenthal gives away an insane compilation of UI elements directly from Spotify’s artist pages. This huge layout will take a little time to fully depict and understand. You’ve got sidebars full of navigation menus deep into the layout. These layouts allow users to access different aspects of the artist pages. You’ve got the latest songs, a music player integrated, and an addition of related artists. You’ve got to take your time to understand this layout fully; however, you can and should enjoy the journey because it’s a true treasure.

17. Pure CSS Masonry Layout with Flexbox

Jhey Tompkins is a CSS expert with more than 15,000 individual contributions on GitHub in the last year alone; what an amazing achievement! Many of his repositories on GitHub have 100+ stars, and he’s well known amongst his peers. This particular CSS layout from Jhey also uses Flexbox to attain a solid masonry layout ready for your elements and website widgets. Some exciting features include “flip” individual grids for added creativity and highlighted ones once the user hovers over them. It is a perfect grid layout for a website project dealing with many content.

I hope this article helped you to find the best CSS layout for your net project. Additionally, you can check our list of the best CSS frameworks for front-end web development. For even quicker web development you can use any of our website templates that have CSS layout already in place and you can modify any aspect of them.