A client, a U.S.-based manufacturer of professional-grade lighting products, faced a common but tricky issue on their multilingual website. Translated words often varied in length compared to English, causing navigation and interface elements to wrap or overflow unpredictably. These inconsistencies disrupted the site's layout and could undermine the user experience for international audiences.
The challenge required a solution that went beyond traditional responsive design. Standard media queries, which adjust layouts based on the viewport size, could not address issues arising from the varying lengths of translated text within specific containers.
Visus implemented CSS container queries, a modern approach that allows individual elements to respond to the size of their containing element rather than the overall viewport. This provided precise control over navigation and content areas, ensuring that translated text displayed cleanly without breaking the layout, while maintaining a flexible design for English users.
The results were immediate. Elements dynamically resized based on both the length of the text and the space available in their containers, eliminating styling bugs on translated pages. The site maintained a predictable, polished layout across languages, enhancing usability and visual consistency.
This project demonstrates an important insight for teams managing multilingual websites: anticipating how translations affect layout is critical. Leveraging modern CSS features like container queries empowers designers to create resilient, language-agnostic interfaces that scale effectively for global audiences.