https://open.nytimes.com/css-grid-for-designers-f74a883b98f5

For years, designers have been using grids to bring order to pages. Grids as a design tool are associated with the Swiss who formalized it as a way of thinking about layout in the 1940s, according to Beth Tondreau in the book “Layout Essentials”. As people started designing for the Internet, grid systems were carried from the printed page to the digital one.

During this time, CSS (the code that controls the style of elements in your browser) was limited in terms of layout capabilities. My teammate, Natalya Shelburne, an engineer at The New York Times, equates it to trying to create designs using the tooling of Microsoft Word. As a workaround to these limitations, a number of layout frameworks were developed to make working with layout easier. In 2011, Twitter released Bootstrap, one of the more popular layout solutions. Bootstrap did a bunch of calculations behind the scenes, so that developers could use simplified code to implement layouts on a 12-column grid.