CSS Tips: How to make an element smaller or bigger with CSS

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Sometimes you might have the need, especially when designing a page, to scale an item so it looks smaller, or bigger.

You can use the CSS zoom property to scale any HTML element.

Use a value < 1 to make an element smaller. For example, half the size with 0.5:

div {
  zoom: 0.5;
}

or use a value > 1 to make the element bigger, like in this case to scale it 2x:

div {
  zoom: 2;
}

Note that it does not work in Firefox, you could use -moz-transform: scale(NUMBER); instead (and if you go that route, you can use transform: scale(NUMBER); on all browsers, too).

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: How to center an element with CSS
2: CSS Border inside the element
3: What are good CSS Breakpoint values for Responsive Design?
4: How to debug CSS by bisecting
5: How to disable text selection using CSS
6: How to put an item at the bottom of its container using CSS
7: CSS, how to select elements that do NOT have a class
8: How to stick an element on the bottom of the page with flexbox
9: How to apply padding to multiple lines in CSS
10: Making a table responsive using CSS
11: CSS url()
12: ▶︎ How to make an element smaller or bigger with CSS
13: Customizing visited links
14: Fix extra space after inline element
15: How to create a sidebar that’s sticky but also scrolls
16: How to embed YouTube videos using the correct aspect ratio
17: Responsive pre tags in CSS
18: Responsive YouTube Video Embeds
19: How to remove all CSS from a page at once
20: How I added Dark Mode to my website
21: How to add a simple dark mode