Typography is the most visible part of any interface. Text is everywhere — headings, body copy, labels, buttons, captions — and the choices of font, size, weight, line height, and letter spacing determine whether the interface reads as polished or amateurish. Tailwind provides utilities for each of these dimensions, and because they derive from the…
Text styling goes beyond font family, size, and weight. Once the type scale is in place, the remaining decisions are about how text sits within its container, how it is decorated, how it is transformed, and what happens when it does not fit. These four families — alignment, decoration, transformation, and truncation — handle the…
Flexbox is the layout model that made one-dimensional alignment practical. Before flexbox, centering an element vertically required hacks with tables, absolute positioning, or negative margins. With flexbox, a container declares its direction and alignment, and the children distribute themselves accordingly. Tailwind wraps every flexbox property in a utility, so the CSS becomes a set of…
Flexbox has a container level and an item level. The container properties — justify-*, items-*, gap-* — control how all children are arranged. The item properties — grow, shrink, basis, and order — control how each child behaves within that arrangement. These four properties determine whether an item expands to fill space, compresses when space…
CSS Grid is the two-dimensional layout system that complement flexbox’s one dimension. Flexbox arranges items along a single axis; grid arranges them along both rows and columns simultaneously. This makes grid the right tool for page layouts, dashboards, card galleries, and any design where the alignment of items in both directions matters. Tailwind exposes the…
Tailwind CSS v4 eliminated a long-standing limitation: grid utilities no longer require configuration for non-standard column or row counts. Where v3 forced developers to either extend the theme.gridTemplateColumns configuration or drop into arbitrary value syntax like grid-cols-[repeat(15,minmax(0,1fr))], v4 generates utilities dynamically. The class grid-cols-15 works out of the box, producing exactly the CSS you would…
Every element on a page is a box, and the box model determines how that box is sized, how it relates to its siblings, and how its content behaves when it does not fit. Tailwind provides utilities for the four properties that define the box: display, which determines the formatting context; box-sizing, which determines whether…
CSS positioning determines where an element is placed in the document and how it responds to scrolling and to the other elements around it. Tailwind provides a utility for each of the five position values — static, relative, absolute, fixed, and sticky — plus the inset utilities that control the offsets for the positioned elements….
The z-index property controls which element appears on top when two elements overlap. It is the last line of defense in CSS layout: when positioning, transforms, or opacity cause elements to overlap, z-index decides the order. But z-index is also one of the most misunderstood properties in CSS, because it does not operate globally. It…
Background color is one of the most frequently used utilities in Tailwind, and it is also the one where v4 made the most significant internal change. In v3, applying opacity to a background required two classes: a color utility and a separate opacity utility like bg-opacity-50. In v4, the opacity is part of the color…