True CSS student who wants to become an eternal student slaps his face with "too complicated Layout", jumps from the cliff of "CSS tricks not for a beginner" and keeps his/her hands dirty with a "not too simple colors".
Just implement basic components from scratch starting from 12 col grid using floats (stone age technology), flexboxes (iron age) and CSS grid itself (hip hop); dropdowns, tooltips, popups, cards with images and caption, whatever.
At the end, practical exercise means real world and big "complicated" layouts. If it is too hard for you, well, adapt or die, or change career.