How to Center Elements in CSS With Flexbox

Using flexbox, it takes only three rules to dead center elements in CSS:

.city {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
}

• justify-content centers it on the horizontal axis
• align-items centers it along the vertical axis

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Don't Want to Use Flexbox?

There are several other ways to dead center elements. If you need to center a text vertically, you can do it by setting the line-height to the height of its container:

.container {
  background: cornflowerblue;
  width: 250px;
  height: 250px;
  text-align: center;
  /* set line-height to the height of the container */
  line-height: 250px;
}

You can also easily center absolutely positioned elements by using transform.

.center {
  top: 50%;
  left: 50%;
  /**
   * This will move the element -50% 
   * It will also move it -50% to the top
   **/
  transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
}

By default, anchor points are set to the top-left corner of an element. To dead center absolutely positioned elements, you need to move them back -50% on both axis. Think of it as setting an anchor point to the center.

• justify-content in flexbox
• align-items in flexbox