Using the Box Component in Material-UI to Easily Style Your Project

Style your app without using CSS files, CSS-in-JS, or inline styles

Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash

The Box component in Material-UI is very useful for styling elements in a React app. You can do so without using any separate CSS files, or using the built-in makeStyles hook that is often used.

When I first learned about Material-UI, I was not introduced to the Box component until later on. Now that I am using it every day for my job, I am realizing how useful it is. I hope this article can give you some insight into this component and help you style your projects.

In this article, we will take a look at the Box component in Material-UI. We will first talk about how it works, then dive into some examples.

If you are new to Material-UI, check out the articles below to get started.

Create a Customized Color Theme in Material-UI

What Really Happens When You Use the TextField Component in Material-UI?

The Box Component

According to the documentation,

“The Box component serves as a wrapper component for most of the CSS utility needs.”

You can think of it like a <div> element in HTML. If we actually take a look under the hood, rendering the Box component will create a DOM element for us which is a <div>.

<Box>Box component in Material-UI</Box>

We can change this <div> to another element if we want to by passing a component prop like so.

<Box component="span">This will now be a span</Box>

Besides changing the DOM element, you can add almost any CSS styling to the Box component.

Here is a list of the different style functions that you can use. These are all coming from…