Stacking elements on top of each other with CSS grid

Even dough I don't believe the CSS grid was designed especially for stacking elements one on top of each other this can be achieved easily with a combination of grid-area and z-index.

Let's say we want to build the below widget.

This can be described by the following HTML structure:

<div class="card">
    <div class="top">A cat named</div>
    <div class="bottom">TOM</div>
    <img src="http://examples.js-craft.io/tom.png" alt="TOM">
</div>

If we place it in grid layout of 1 column - 3 rows then we can easily say something like:

.card { display: grid; }
img {  grid-area: 1 / 1 / 4 / 2;  }
.top { grid-area: 1 / 1 / 2 / 2; }
.bottom { grid-area: 3 / 1 / 4 / 2; }
.card div { z-index: 2; }

That's pretty much all that we need to stack elements on top of each other with the CSS grid. Just don't forget to set the z-index prop to the elements you want on top and that the grid-column is using line numbers to place items. Therefore that's the reason why we have lines like img { grid-area: 1 / 1 / 4 / 2; } even if we have just 1 column and 3 rows.

Below you have the full working example:

See the Pen
tom-cat by JS Craft (@js-craft)
on CodePen.