Throughout your career in front-end development, you have to work on all scales of projects. However, when working on small, low-budget projects, you might not need bundles of features that large UI frameworks, like Bootstrap. Kickstrap and BootMetro offer.
Fortunately, we have shortlisted some of the best, simplest, and minimal CSS frameworks to get all your UI needs covered. These frameworks ensure a shallow learning curve for newbie developers, little or no dependency on JavaScript for functionality, as well as faster load times for your audience. Besides, you can also avail all essential ingredients for building user-friendly responsive web designs.
1. Kube
Kube is a CSS framework and is less than 6KB of CSS. Its responsive grid system, multiple table classes, and a powerful set of classes for styling the forms make it a must-try. This minimal, responsive, and adaptive framework has no imposed styling and gives you the utmost freedom to show your creativity.
Kube is packed with one compact CSS file and two JS files used for creating responsive layouts quickly and integrating tabs and buttons in the layout, respectively. In addition, you can download its developer version for maximum flexibility that includes variables, modules, and mixins.
2. Milligram
If you are looking for a framework that can facilitate the modern UIs, a milligram is a right choice. Milligram accompanies a minimal setup of styles to ensure a fast and clean start. With only 2kb gzipped, the small yet robust framework is the most lightweight online framework.
The framework is the best pick for small projects. Making milligram’s grid system different is its CSS Flexible Box Layout Module and rem unit. It also introduces some key components to get you started including blockquotes, lists, tables, buttons, forms, etc.
3. Skeleton
A lightweight CSS framework offering the absolute essentials to create new websites is the perfect description of a skeleton. Though the framework hasn’t experienced any update in a year, it serves as a high-quality boilerplate for modern and responsive web designs. In addition, it offers an intuitive grid system and base/grid CSS styles.
Built upon just 400 lines of code, the Skeleton framework is known for its simplicity and compactness. As a result, the framework is best for small website projects created by developers with very little know-how about coding.
4. Furtive
Furtive is a forward-thinking, mobile-first framework with a very small footprint. Also known as “CSS micro-framework,” Furtive is the best option for modern web designs. All dimensions in furtive are done in rem. In addition, furtive offers a responsive grid system established on display: flex; Divided into a series of 6 columns, the framework also helps you leverage the latest tech such as flexbox, limited vendor prefixing, and SVGs.
5. Pure CSS
Pure is a simple, minimal CSS framework that should be on your radar when you require just the basics of a UI framework to work on your project. Pure CSS is led by Yahoo! developers and helps you quickly build responsive web designs. When minified and gzipped, the user-friendly framework sizes up to 3.8kb. Moreover, Pure CSS has basic styles required for all HTML elements (including, Normalize.css which gives the design a uniform look across all website browsers). However, it also allows the developer to add custom grids to save oodles of time when building the page.
6. Blaze CSS
As an open Source Modular CSS Framework, Blaze CSS gives your layout a structure and comprehensive starting point. With components providing excellent structure, the framework is designed to help you increase your development speed. Its less-inclined learning curve has gained much attention from the new developers.
The lightweight CSS framework easily reduces its file size because its modular architecture allows you to add only the parts you want to use in your project. This makes your payload small and focused.
To wrap up
Technology is making things simpler, even in the IT world. For example, UI frameworks have eliminated the need for creating a new layout right from scratch. This post is intended to provide you with a better perspective on multiple framework options available for your following web projects. The frameworks listed here are some of the most popular, feature-rich, robust, and promising frameworks known at present.
If you know other frameworks that are not mentioned here, please share them in the comments below to make a valuable contribution to the blog.
Author Bio:
An adventurous soul, cat-lover, and coffee addict all describe Adila Bitar. Currently, she is working as a technical writer in a web development company. She loves to research technology-based articles and spread valuable knowledge to readers.
