CSS Grid can be used to stack elements

I came across Sarah Dresner's article How to Stack Elements in CSS and learned that one could use display: grid; to stack elements. That's right, place elements over each other without a position: absolute! 😲

The trick are overlapping grid-area declarations.

Let's say we have the following HTML:

<div class="photoCard">
  <img src="https://.../cutedog.jpg" alt="A cute dog">
  <div class="red">red</div>
  <div class="blue">blue</div>
</div>

Then you place the elements using CSS Grid as follows:

.photoCard {
  display: grid;
}

img { grid-area: 1 / 1 / 4 / 2; }
.red { grid-area: 1 / 1 / 2 / 2; }
.blue { grid-area: 3 / 1 / 4 / 2; }

The CSS above makes the img element span over three rows. Contrary, the .blue and .red element are placed on the first and third row leading them to be stacked on top of the image.

To visualize it, I made a quick #devsheet about it. 😊