The Four CSS Properties Challenge: What Your Choices Say About You

A Question That Started an Office Debate

Donnie D'Amato posed an intriguing constraint on his blog: if you could only use four CSS properties to build an entire website, which would you choose? When the CSS-Tricks team tackled this question, it sparked the kind of passionate debate you'd normally reserve for tabs versus spaces or whether semicolons are optional in JavaScript.

The challenge seems simple on the surface, but it quickly becomes strategic. Choose margin for spacing and you might regret not picking padding. Commit to display: flex and you've already used one of your precious four slots just to unlock flexbox capabilities.

What the Pros Actually Chose

The CSS-Tricks team's responses reveal fascinating patterns in how different developers approach problems. Most gravitated toward the font shorthand, recognizing that typography drives content hierarchy. Nearly everyone picked either color or padding for visual breathing room. But the real divergence came in layout philosophy.

Some developers went all-in on structure with display and grid properties, while others prioritized visual polish with background and color-scheme. Ryan Trimble chose flex-direction specifically for responsive multi-directional layouts, while Zell Liew kept it minimalist with just font, max-width, margin, and color.

What struck me most was Danny Schwarz's wild card move: he only chose three properties and deliberately left the fourth slot empty. His reasoning? Sometimes constraints aren't meant to be maxed out.

My Own Analysis of This Exercise

Having built production websites for years, this challenge exposes something deeper than CSS knowledge. It reveals your design philosophy. Are you a structure-first developer who can't function without proper layout systems? Or are you content-focused, believing good typography can carry a minimal design?

The shorthand properties become incredibly valuable under these constraints. font gives you seven sub-properties in one choice. background unlocks gradients, images, positioning, and sizing. grid provides an entire layout system. Strategic thinking matters more than technical knowledge here.

Where I'd Approach This Differently

Most responses focused on what you need to make things work. I'm curious about what you need to make things distinctive. What if one of your four choices was transform or clip-path? You'd sacrifice some layout control, but you'd gain the ability to create memorable visual moments that set your site apart.

The community responses in the comments are equally telling. Someone pointed out they'd analyzed their actual CSS usage patterns and discovered their real top four differed completely from what they thought they'd choose. That gap between perception and practice matters.

The Practical Lesson Here

This isn't just a fun thought experiment. It's a lens for evaluating your own development patterns. When you reach for CSS solutions, what's your default toolbox? Are you relying too heavily on certain properties while ignoring more efficient alternatives?

Try this exercise with your own recent projects. What four properties appear most frequently in your stylesheets? The answer might surprise you and reveal optimization opportunities you hadn't considered.

Testing My Own Choices

If forced to choose right now, I'd probably go with font, padding, display, and color-scheme. The first three are non-negotiable for basic functionality. The fourth gives me light/dark theming and works beautifully with the light-dark() function for minimal effort.

But ask me again tomorrow and I might swap padding for background depending on whether I'm prioritizing spacing or visual richness. The fact that my answer changes based on project context is exactly what makes this challenge valuable.

Your Turn to Choose

So what would your four properties be? More importantly, what does that choice reveal about how you approach front-end development? The constraints force honesty about your priorities in ways that open-ended questions never could.

Source: This post was inspired by "What're Your Top 4 CSS Properties?" by Geoff Graham at CSS-Tricks, featuring insights from the entire CSS-Tricks team. The article includes community responses and different developer perspectives on this constraint-based challenge.