This had me thinking if there are there any other mnemonic devices or ways that to remember complex things in CSS? Are there any other tricks you’d recommend? It sort of reminds me of the way kids are taught to remember the names of planets with things like, “My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine” where the first letter in each word represents the first letter of each planet: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.The text-justify property in CSS is a companion to the text-align property that is used to set the justification method of text when text-align is set to the justify value.

align-items: shorter word: vertical alignment.

justify-content: longer word: horizontal alignment.

See the Pen align-items: center by Robin Rendle ( on CodePen.

See the Pen justify-content: center by Robin Rendle ( on CodePen. I even used it five minutes ago when I needed to make these two quick demos:

At first I thought this was a really silly idea but now this is how I remember it. This text-justify property spreads the words into the complete line with equal spaces. Text-justify property is always applied with the text-align property. The text-justify property specifies the justification of the text when text-align property is set to justify value. She said that justify-content positions elements across the horizontal axis because the word itself is longer than align-items. The following article provides an outline for Justify Text in CSS.

Well, that was when she gave me what I think is the best shorthand way of remembering how the two work together. “How do I center an element horizontally with flex again?” I wondered. I was talking with a pal the other day and moaning about flexbox for the millionth time because I had momentarily forgotten the difference between the justify-content and align-items properties.

Center and justify text css