Boost Your Web Projects with Picnic CSS – A Lightweight Library

By Jake Rocheleau. in Toolkit. Updated on April 6, 2023.

Some developers prefer detailed UI libraries, such as Bootstrap, for its feature-rich styles. But, there are many smaller CSS libraries made for subtle design aesthetics and customization.

If you’re looking for a small yet stylish CSS library I recommend Picnic CSS. It’s completely free, open source, and works without much editing to jazz up your pages with simple yet elegant styles.

All native HTML elements are restyled by default, so you don’t even need to rely on classes. Just add the Picnic stylesheet to your web page and refresh. You’ll notice all the forms, buttons, and typographic elements all take on a new look.

But, of course, this library does support modular design with options for customizing everything. It’s all written in Sass, so you really need to be a Sass developer to work through the code.

You have access to all the default typography, classes, grid systems, and variables used for styling & coloring page elements.

Picnic CSS was also built to be incredibly small and it measures only 10KB in size when minified. This is about 1/10^th of Bootstrap and it still has all the charm you’d expect in a custom UI framework.

Since this is a small library, it doesn’t have any dynamic features. But, you can see examples on the test page which includes buttons, headers, cards, inputs, tabs and other similar elements.

Some of the dynamic elements, such as modals and tabs, work with pure CSS. So, you can also build compliant websites by ignoring JavaScript completely. Pretty cool!

I do think the default Picnic styles are a tad bland so they could use some retouching. But, overall, I adore this library and it’s one of the simplest ways to start a new project on the right foot.

To get started, visit the Picnic CSS GitHub page to download a copy and view some samples. You can also browse the online documentation to see how each element works and what you need to get it all running.

Picnic is even available on a CDN, so you don’t even need to download files locally to get started.