How do you make a layout with pictures down one side of a page matched up with paragraphs on the other side?

I got this exact question in an email the other day, and I thought it would make a nice blog post because of how wonderfully satisfying this is to do in CSS these days. Plus we can sprinkle in polish to it as we go.

HTML-wise, I’m thinking image, text, image, text, etc.

<img src="..." alt="..." height="" width="" />
<p>Text text text...</p> <img src="..." alt="..." height="" width="" />
<p>Text text text...</p> <img src="..." alt="..." height="" width="" />
<p>Text text text...</p>

If that was our entire body in an HTML document, the answer to the question in the blog post title is literally two lines of CSS:

body { display: grid; grid-template-columns: min-content 1fr;
}

It’s going to look something like this…

Not pretty but we got the job done very quickly.

So cool. Thanks CSS. But let’s clean it up. Let’s make sure there is a gap, set the default type, and reign in the layout.

body { display: grid; padding: 2rem; grid-template-columns: 300px 1fr; gap: 1rem; align-items: center; max-width: 800px; margin: 0 auto; font: 500 100%/1.5 system-ui;
}
img { max-width: 100%; height: auto;
}

I mean… ship it, right? Close, but maybe we can just add a quick mobile style.

@media (max-width: 650px) { body { display: block; font-size: 80%; } p { position: relative; margin: -3rem 0 2rem 1rem; padding: 1rem; background: rgba(white, 0.8); }
}