A dead simple, responsive boilerplate.

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Light as a feather at less than a kb & built with mobile in mind.
Styles designed to be a starting point, not a UI framework.
Quick to start with zero compiling or installing necessary.
Is Skeleton for you?

You should use Skeleton if you're feeling like whole UI frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation are overkill for your project and you just want the basics. Skeleton only styles a handful of standard HTML elements and includes a grid, but that's often more than enough to get started. In fact, this site is built on Skeleton and has just over 100 lines of custom CSS.

Love Skeleton and want to Tweet it, share it, or star it? Well, I appreciate that <3

The grid

The grid is a 12-column fluid grid with a max width of 960px, that shrinks with the browser/device at smaller sizes. The max width can be changed with one line of CSS and all columns will resize accordingly. The syntax is simple and it makes coding responsive much easier. Go ahead, resize the browser.

One
Eleven
Two
Ten
Three
Nine
Four
Eight
Five
Seven
Six
Six
Seven
Five
Eight
Four
Nine
Three
Ten
Two
Eleven
One

One
Eleven
Two
Ten
2/3
1/2
1/2
Typography

Type is all set with the rems, so font-sizes and spacial relationships can be responsively sized based on a single <html> font-size property. Out of the box, Skeleton never changes the <html> font-size, but it's there in case you need it for your project. All measurements are still base 10 though so, an <h1> with 5.0remfont-size just means 50px.

The typography base is Raleway served by Google, set at 15rem (15px) over a 1.6 line height (24px). Other type basics like anchors, strong, emphasis, and underline are all obviously included.

Headings create a family of distinct sizes each with specific letter-spacing, line-height, and margins.

Heading <h1> 50rem

Heading <h2> 42rem

Heading <h3> 36rem

Heading <h4> 30rem

Heading <h5> 24rem
Heading <h6> 15rem

Heading

Heading

Heading

Heading

Heading
Heading

The base type is 15px over 1.6 line height (24px)

Bolded Italicized Colored Underlined
Buttons

Buttons come in two basic flavors in Skeleton. The standard <button> element is plain, whereas the .button-primary button is vibrant and prominent. Button styles are applied to a number of appropriate form elements, but can also be arbitrarily attached to anchors with a .button class.

Anchor button
Anchor button

Anchor button





Anchor button




Forms

Forms are a huge pain, but hopefully these styles make it a bit easier. All inputs, select, and buttons are normalized for a common height cross-browser so inputs can be stacked or placed alongside each other.


Lists
  • Unordered lists have basic styles
  • They use the circle list style
    • Nested lists styled to feel right
    • Can nest either type of list into the other
  • Just more list items mama san
  1. Ordered lists also have basic styles
  2. They use the decimal list style
    • Ordered and unordered can be nested
    • Can nest either type of list into the other
  3. Last list item just for the fun
  • Item 1
  • Item 2
    • Item 2.1
    • Item 2.2
  • Item 3
Code

Code styling is kept basic – just wrap anything in a <code> and it will appear like this. For blocks of code, wrap a <code> with a <pre>.

.some-class {
  background-color: red;
}
.some-class {
  background-color: red;
}
Tables

Be sure to use properly formed table markup with <thead> and <tbody> when building a table.

Name Age Sex Location
Dave Gamache 26 Male San Francisco
Dwayne Johnson 42 Male Hayward
Name Age Sex Location
Dave Gamache 26 Male San Francisco
Dwayne Johnson 42 Male Hayward
Media queries

Skeleton uses media queries to serve its scalable grid, but also has a list of queries for convenience of styling your site across devices. There are two sets of queries. The first set is mobile-first, meaning it targets min-width. The other set is desktop-first, meaning it targets max-width. Mobile-first queries are how Skeleton's grid is built and is a preferrable method of organizing CSS. The sizes for the queries are:

  • Desktop HD: 1200px
  • Desktop: 1000px
  • Tablet: 750px
  • Phablet: 550px
  • Mobile: 400px
/* Mobile first queries */

/* Larger than mobile */
@media (min-width: 400px) {}

/* Larger than phablet */
@media (min-width: 550px) {}

/* Larger than tablet */
@media (min-width: 750px) {}

/* Larger than desktop */
@media (min-width: 1000px) {}

/* Larger than Desktop HD */
@media (min-width: 1200px) {}


/* Desktop first queries */

/* Smaller than Desktop HD */
@media (max-width: 1199px) {}

/* Smaller than desktop */
@media (max-width: 999px) {}

/* Smaller than tablet */
@media (max-width: 749px) {}

/* Smaller than phablet */
@media (max-width: 549px) {}

/* Smaller than mobile */
@media (max-width: 399px) {}

/* Note: Values are 1px less on desktop first queries so there's no overriding in case you use both types of queries  */

Utilities

Skeleton has a number of small utility classes that act as easy-to-use helpers. Sometimes it's better to use a utility class than create a whole new class just to float an element.

/* Utility Classes */

/* Make element full width */
.u-full-width {
  width: 100%;
  box-sizing: border-box; }

/* Make sure elements don't run outside containers (great for images in columns) */
.u-max-full-width {
  max-width: 100%;
  box-sizing: border-box; }

/* Float either direction */
.u-pull-right {
  float: right; }
.u-pull-left {
  float: left; }

/* Clear a float */
.u-cf { 
  content: "";
  display: table;
  clear: both; }

Examples of Skeleton sites
License

All parts of Skeleton are free to use and abuse under the open-source MIT license. More importantly, if you're into coding head over to the Github page and contribute or fork this bad boy.

Skeleton's version history is available on Github.

Colophon

Skeleton was built using Sublime Text 3 and designed with Sketch. The typeface Raleway was created by Matt McInerney and Pablo Impallari. Code highlighting by Google's Prettify library. Icons in the header are all derivative work of icon from The Noun Project. Feather by Zach VanDeHey, Pen (with cap) by Ed Harrison, Pen (with clicker) by Matthew Hall, and Watch by Julien Deveaux.

Code hidden visible