For everybody who doesn’t use Internet Explorer, CSS is the gift from the gods that made the web more beautiful. Galleries of CSS magic, then, basically boil down to “porn for web designers”.

While your day-to-day reality will more likely involve getting a shopping cart application to check credit card numbers correctly on a client’s ASP-powered site, you can always dream of a world where Microsoft is shelled into the ground and we can all use the modern, 21st-century web.

CSS Play – Stu Nicholls is nothing less than the wizard of CSS. Is there anything he can’t do with it? He can draw Christmas trees, make maze games, animate sprites, create fly-out and pop-out menus, and tell you ten ways to make an interactive image gallery.

Web Designer Wall – When you land at this page, the startling design tells you right away that you’re at the site of a true artist. Chock-full of inspiration.

25 Hot Female Designers – It’s a common complaint that females in tech careers are sorely underrepresented, so here’s a list of 25 of them and screenshots of their site. At least the design field gets to have a balanced male/female ratio!

CSS Vault – Very complete collection of CSS designs, all organized by layout.

CSS3 Preview – You’ll be sick with desire when you see some of the things we could have in CSS3. For instance, how many lines of Javascript are you using to get rounded corners on your boxes? CSS3 gives you one short line.

CSS Zen Garden – We couldn’t leave this out or everybody would say, “Hey, you forgot Zen Garden!” So here’s the most famous of them all – a single page of XHTML which users can then customize by submitting CSS designs. The gallery has expanded over the years, so there’s a lot to see now.

Categories: Web Design