Box

Box is the lowest-level component for binding theme-based styles to an individual element on the screen. Internally, all Balance components are made up of Boxes.

Semantic elements

By default, Box renders a div element. You can customise this via the as prop. Non-Balance props will be forwarded to the underlying element.

<Box as="span" aria-hidden>
  ...
</Box>

Usage

Padding

The padding keys allow targeting each side as well as the x-axis and y-axis.

• padding
• paddingTop
• paddingRight
• paddingBottom
• paddingLeft
• paddingX padding-left and padding-right
• paddingY padding-top and padding-bottom

Margin

The margin keys allow targeting each side as well as the x-axis and y-axis.

• margin
• marginTop
• marginRight
• marginBottom
• marginLeft
• marginX margin-left and margin-right
• marginY margin-top and margin-bottom

Border

Apply a border to the box:

Border radius

Apply a border-radius to the box:

Box shadow

Apply a box-shadow to the box:

Height

Apply a height to the box:

Width

Apply a width to the box:

Combined

Mix and match style properties to achieve the desired aesthetic.

Responsive Props

Instead of manually managing media queries and adding nested style objects throughout a code base, we offer a convenient shorthand syntax for adding responsive styles with a mobile-first approach.

Each of the above style props accepts a value or array of values. To skip certain breakpoints, you can pass null to any position in the array to avoid generating unnecessary CSS.

While this approach has been widely adopted with great success, much like any new idea, it can seem odd or off-putting at first. We recommend giving it a chance.

Building on Box

useBoxStyles is the hook Box itself uses to turn its props into CSS — reach for it if you're building a component with the same spacing/border/ background vocabulary but that doesn't want to render a Box underneath. MarginProps, PaddingProps, ChildFlexProps and ChildGridProps are the individual prop-group types it's built from, exported so you can compose the same vocabulary into your own component's props without redeclaring it.