Introduction

The objective of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive understanding of Flexbox, a powerful CSS layout module that enables you to design flexible, responsive layouts with ease.

By the end of this tutorial, you will learn:
- The basics of Flexbox
- How to use Flexbox utilities for layout design
- Alignment control using Flexbox

The prerequisites for this tutorial include basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Step-by-step Guide

Flexbox, or the Flexible Box Layout, is a CSS3 web layout model. It improves the items alignment, directions and order in the container even when they are with dynamic or even unknown size. The prime characteristic of the flex container is the ability to modify the width or height of its children to fill the available space in the best possible way on different screen sizes.

Flex Container

To use the flexbox model, you need to first define a flex container. You can do this by setting the property display to flex or inline-flex for the container element.

.container {
  display: flex;
}

Flex Direction

Flexbox allows you to change the direction of the flex items. By default, the flex items are laid out in the same direction as the text direction (row), but you can change this using the flex-direction property.

.container {
  flex-direction: row | row-reverse | column | column-reverse;
}

Flex Wrap

The flex-wrap property is used to specify whether the flex items should wrap or not.

.container {
  flex-wrap: nowrap | wrap | wrap-reverse;
}

Flex Flow

The flex-flow property is a shorthand property for setting both the flex-direction and flex-wrap properties.

.container {
  flex-flow: column wrap;
}

Code Examples

Let's look at some practical examples of using flexbox.

Simple Flexbox Layout

In this example, we create a simple layout with a row of three evenly spaced boxes.

<div class="container">
  <div class="box">1</div>
  <div class="box">2</div>
  <div class="box">3</div>
</div>

.container {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: space-between;
}

.box {
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
  border: 1px solid black;
}

In the CSS above, display: flex; makes .container a flex container. justify-content: space-between; spaces out the .box elements evenly.

Summary

In this tutorial, we learned about the basics of Flexbox, how to use different Flexbox properties to control the layout and alignment of elements.

The next step for learning would be to practice building different layouts using Flexbox, as well as combining Flexbox with other CSS properties for more complex designs. Some resources for further learning include the CSS Tricks Flexbox guide and the MDN Flexbox guide.

Practice Exercises

1. Create a layout with three columns of equal width.
2. Create a layout where the first box is twice as large as the second.
3. Create a layout with a single row of boxes that wraps onto a new line if there's not enough space.

Solutions and explanations to these exercises can be found in the comments of your code editor. Always remember, practice is key to mastering any concept.