A great many sites these days are devoted exclusively to CSS inspiration. And why not? Its ability to dramatically transform a website makes it a robust outlet for creativity, and many designers have come up with some pretty amazing applications. Without further ado, here are some of the best sites we’ve bookmarked.

1. CSS Mania

2. CSS Based

3. CSS Remix

4. CSS 2.0

5. CSS Beauty

6. CSS Vault

7. CSS Reboot

8. CSS Import

9. Boxed CSS

10. CSS Impress

Enjoy!

Come on in. We’ve swept the floor and taken out the garbage. Sure it’s a little spare, but we’re sure you’ll warm to it. Your comments on the design and content so far are welcome, and so are you!

Photoshop is enormously powerful, and you don’t need to understand everything about it in order to use it. One good thing to know if you make websites, though, is how to make a tile that can be repeated as a nice background image. Here’s a simple tutorial on how to make a simple Photoshop pattern.

1. First, let’s grab a public domain image of something that will look nice as a sort of wallpaper. I chose the double-tailed lion of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and added some space around it to make a 240px x 240px canvas.

2. Now add guides (View–>New Guide…) vertically and horizontally at 120px. This will divide the image into four quadrants.

Next, using the rectangle selection tool, we’ll select the part of the lion in the bottom right quadrant.

3. We’ll right-click and choose “Layer via Copy”, and we’re going to move the new layer into the opposite corner of the image, the upper left corner.

4. We’re going to repeat this process in the other three quadrants, so we should be left with an image that looks like this:

5. Now we save the image for the web and we’ve got our background tile!

Want to see how it looks on a web page?

Questions or comments are welcome!

Internet memes come and go, the common thread being that most involve little actual work, just a gimmick that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the Internet. There are, however, many enduringly interesting projects currently getting attention on the web. Among the neatest is Exactitudes.com.

It’s tough to tell from this range, but this is a giant collection of people, grouped into sets of 12 based on similarity in features and dress. They’re from all over the world, showing all types of people. The effort that must’ve been required to find, photograph and edit all of this is quite impressive, and the final result is very much so.

Flickr is a terrific community that’s probably done more for amateur photography than anyone since Kodak. The sheer amount of images available can lead to hours spent browsing or tag-searching. We recently came across another tool to take the time-wasting to a new level: the Color Fields Colr Pickr.

Like the title says, you pick the color and you see Flickr photos that match it. Pretty nifty, we think.

The timeless war between the images craved by users and the text craver by search engine bots can have designers tearing their hair out. One of the most excruciating web browser quirks is the limited support for more than a handful of fonts. With cross-browser compatibility required by any self-respecting designer, we grudgingly cycle between Verdana, Trebuchet and Georgia, with classic fonts like Futura relegated to the sidelines. Imagine how spectacular your site would look if you could have big, bold titles like this:

Well maybe you can. While it would take quite a while to tweak the code for every post on a site, wouldn’t it be possible to have the title in Verdana with a div underneath, using the above picture as a background-image? The text would be sort of “hidden”, which is against Google’s guidelines. Still, it’s not really naughty like making the text the same color as the background of a page, making it ultra-tiny, or shunting it way off the screen with a negative margin.

What do we think? Feasible?