UICollectionViewLayout is an incredibly powerful class that allows you to place elements inside a UICollectionView in almost any way your heart desires.

Unfortunately, it’s poorly understood and woefully underused.

Instead, we often try to shoehorn the functionality we want into UICollectionViewFlowLayout, creating a whole new set of issues that are difficult to debug.

Well, that ends today. Throughout this series of articles, you’ll learn how to properly subclass UICollectionViewLayout in order to make your very own incredible layouts.

1. The components of UICollectionViewLayout

In order to begin subclassing UICollectionViewLayout, we need to understand what we’re working with. In this article, we dive into the different elements that compose a layout, and get to the core of what we’re trying to accomplish.

2. Building a custom UICollectionViewLayout from scratch

In order to create your own layout, you’ll need to subclass UICollectionViewLayout. The documentation is very good at telling you what to subclass, but it doesn’t say much about how. In this article, we dive head first into UICollectionViewLayout and how to create our own custom layout.

3. Adding self-sizing cells to a UICollectionViewLayout

Getting Auto Layout to play nicely with `UICollectionViewLayout1 can be an exercise in frustration. In this article, we’ll investigate the lifecycle that allows us to implement self-sizing cells and we’ll identify the hoops we need to jump through so everything just works.

4. Animating insertions and deletions in UICollectionViewLayout

Finally, we’ll take a stroll through the different animation APIs that can help us make our collection view more dynamic and pleasing.

I really hope this deep dive into UICollectionViewLayout will help you wrangle this misunderstood UIKit class. If it does, I’d love to hear about it on Twitter! Let me know ☺️