Learning Tailwind CSS

I'm here to share some resources I found whilst learning Tailwind CSS. The past month I've taught myself web development (React, Next.js, Firebase, Tailwind) and been working on Breathe Journal for Here, my startup – I'm sure I'll find a chance to talk about that when we launch!

Anyway on to Tailwind:

Tailwind CSS - Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.

Documentation for the Tailwind CSS framework.

Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.

In the past I'd dabbled with Bootstrap and Bulma for styling websites but never quite got up to speed using them and ended up ditching previous projects.

Tailwind was the opposite, after getting through a series of introduction tutorials I was off to the races and felt a productivity boost immediately with the utility class approach.

My favourite feature is the composability of the classes and how closely it ties to a design system. Used in combination with stuff like CSS modules and React Components seem to make sense and helped me build much quicker.

Before sharing resources I think its worth mentioning that Tailwind is open source and under MIT license.

Another project Tailwind UI from the makers of Tailwind CSS is a bundle of pre-built UI components.

When I first found the project I mistook Tailwind for being a paid product and stayed clear of it but actually only these addition components (Marketing, Application UI, Ecommerce) are a paid product.

What I like:

Composability
Extendability and ties to design system
Size classes and mobile first design approach
Code completion in VSCode
Prebuilt UI with Tailwind UI (Paid)

Resources

Below I'll list some high signal resources I found whilst working with Tailwind!

A speedy introduction:

The best tutorial to get started (9 part):

Playground environment:

Tailwind Play

An advanced online playground for Tailwind CSS that lets you use all of Tailwind’s build-time features directly in the browser.

Tailwind Play

Code completion plugin in VSCode:

Tailwind CSS IntelliSense - Visual Studio Marketplace

Extension for Visual Studio Code - Intelligent Tailwind CSS tooling for VS Code

Visual Studio Marketplace

Pre-build UI components for Marketing, Apps, Ecommerce (Paid):

Tailwind UI

Beautiful UI components by the creators of Tailwind CSS.

Official Tailwind CSS Components

Quick example in practise using Tailwind UI by Justin Jackson:

I like how these first two tutorials are using Vite.js to quickly setup an environment for working with Tailwind. Hadn't heard of vite before but like how lightweight it is.

The Things I Add to Tailwind CSS Right Out of the Box

In every project where I use Tailwind CSS, I end up adding something to it. Some of these things I add in every single project. I’ll share these with you,

CSS-TricksGreg Wolanski

Headless UI

Completely unstyled, fully accessible UI components, designed to integrate beautifully with Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind CSS Components. Examples and templates

Tailwind CSS examples from components by the community. Tailwind chart, grids, inputs, forms, templates and much more

Tutorial from the creator of Tailwind (22 part):

Neat searchable cheatsheet, especially useful when matching against designs and knowing the point difference between text-xl and text-2xl:

Tailwind Cheat Sheet

TailWindCSS Cheat sheet. Reference list for all utility classes and CSS properties of Tailwind CSS

Finally the catch all of resources, an awesome GitHub page: