NICOLA GINZLER

Senior Graphic Designer
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HelvetiList image

Five Simple and Practical CSS List Styles You Can Copy and Paste

HelvetiList imageFrom Joshua Johnson at Design Shack, a short tutorial showing the CSS to make several lists with a bit of interest:

We start off with a fun animated vertical list, then style up a list with thumbnails and text, another with just images, [a horizontal menu] and finally an ordered list where the numbers are styled differently than the rest of the type. There’s a ton of great things to learn here so let’s jump in!

HelvetiList

For our first list, we’re going to start with a simple, minimal but super attractive design that’s heavily dependent on the beauty of the typography. We’ll make use of some thin Helvetica styles and toss in a smooth animation on hover.

Demo: Check out the demo and code on CodePen.

HTML

Our markup here is dead simple. Create a div (you’ll probably want a class or ID in a live project), then toss in a header and an unordered list with five list items.

CSS

As we saw in the screenshot above, the list items use very thin type, subtle separators and a hover state that enlarges the font. To start, give the div a width and set your generic h2 styles.

Next, apply a list-style-type of none to ditch the bullets and reset any margins or padding that may be present. For the actual list items, I applied a slight bottom border, which provides that little divider. I did use the last-child selector, but it’s really no big deal if there’s a browser that doesn’t recognize that and decides to throw an extra border on the bottom.

Also notice that both of the times I set the font, I used CSS shorthand and applied different weights. To finish off, I applied some link styles and set the transition to enlarge the font and change the background color on hover.

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div {
  width: 200px;
}
h2 {
  font: 400 40px/1.5 Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
ul {
  list-style-type: none;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
li {
  font: 200 20px/1.5 Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
}
li:last-child {
  border: none;
}
li a {
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #000;
  display: block;
  width: 200px;
  -webkit-transition: font-size 0.3s ease, background-color 0.3s ease;
  -moz-transition: font-size 0.3s ease, background-color 0.3s ease;
  -o-transition: font-size 0.3s ease, background-color 0.3s ease;
  -ms-transition: font-size 0.3s ease, background-color 0.3s ease;
  transition: font-size 0.3s ease, background-color 0.3s ease;
}
li a:hover {
  font-size: 30px;
  background: #f6f6f6;
}

 

Full article including four more kinds of lists:

List with thumbnail images Thumbnail image list

 

Images in a grid Standard thumbnail grid list

 

Horizontal menu Horizontal menu list

 

Ordered list with big numbers Big numbers ordered list

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