Milligram.css – Minimalist Frontend Library for Developers

By Jake Rocheleau. in Toolkit. Updated on March 31, 2023.

From Bootstrap to Foundation there’s no shortage of custom CSS libraries. But what if you need a very simple lightweight option for new web projects? Many existing CSS libraries are heavy and brimming with excessive features.

But Milligram is a super lightweight alternative totaling about 8KB in a minified .css file. It can be installed via Bower, NPM, or direct download hosted locally or through a CDN.

By default the library is built on Normalize so you’ll need to include this library too. But there’s a handy getting started guide on the Milligram homepage that can help you get moving quickly.

If you’re just testing it out then try adding the files directly from a live CDN instead of downloading them locally. This way you can setup a sample project on CodePen or another cloud-based IDE.

Also the library uses the free Roboto font hosted by Google for all its typography. You can use Milligram without Roboto but you won’t get the same sleek font designs.

The extra Normalize library & Google Font can feel like a burden. But they can all be hosted on external CDNs so you don’t need to worry about HTTP load times from your server. And Milligram comes with default formatting for all the basic page elements:

Headers & paragraphs
Ordered & unordered lists
Blockquotes
Tables
Form fields
Images with captions
And quite a bit more!

Take a peek at the Milligram.css homepage to find source code samples and to grab the CDN links. You can also see a kitchen sink demo embedded below featuring all the custom-styled Milligram page elements.