The hard work of front-end designers never ceases to amaze us. Over the last months, we’ve seen Web designers creating and presenting a plethora of truly remarkable CSS techniques and tools. We have collected, analyzed, curated and feature latest useful resources for your convenience, so you can use them right away or save them for future reference.
Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use HTML5, JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well. Thanks to all featured designers and developers for inspiring, hard work.
CSS TechniquesRotational SlidersEric Meyer shares six of his animated transforms that are capable of sliding around to a particular extent with non-centered transform origins.

Generating Organic Randomness with Prime Numbers and CSSAt first, you may be wondering why the heck is Alex Walker talking about cicada’s and Web design. Once taking a closer look, a sort of connection between the two evolves and a ‘cicada principle’ is born.

CSS3 3D HologramBeing inspired by holographic effects that can be achieved with HTML/CSS, Hakim El Hattab has developed his own 3D box which alters perspective depending on device orientation. Note that this requires a webkit browser and has only been tested on iPhone. Also make sure to visit more of Hakim’s CSS/HTML5 experiments.

Checkerboard, striped & other background patterns with CSS3 gradientsYou’re probably familiar with CSS3 gradients by now, including the closer to the standard Mozilla syntax and the verbose Webkit one. I assume you know how to add multiple color stops, make your gradients angled or create radial gradients. What you might not be aware of, is that CSS3 gradients can be used to create many kinds of commonly needed patterns, including checkered patterns, stripes and more. Also, check out Lea’s CSS3 Patterns Gallery
CSS3 KeyboardClick in the box and start typing on your computer’s keyboard. Cleverly developed by Dustin Cartwright and Dustin Hoffman. You’ve got to respect the amount of time and effort which went into producing this demo.

CSS3 Progress BarsA couple of nice progress bars created by Chris Coyier that use no images — just CSS3 fancies. In browsers that do not support CSS3, these progress bars will look more simplified.

Hover on “Everything But”A tutorial by Chris Coyier which shows us how easy adding a hover state to an element can be. In this case, the hover state is applied to everything but the element actually being hovered over.

Creating a Sphere With 3D CSSWith CSS3’s 3D trans­forms it’s possible to cre­ate a sphere-like object, albeit with many elements. Paul Hayes shares his version of a 3D CSS sphere (works in the latest Safari and iOS) and provides us with the coding needed.

CSS3 PlanetariumThis demo highlights leading edge CSS3 and HTML5 features that Mozilla Firefox and the open web community push into modern Web browsers.

Natural Object-Rotation with CSS3 3DA tutorial by Dirk Weber that teaches us how to build a 3D packshot in HTML and CSS by applying some CSS 3D-transforms. By adding some Javascript, we can make the object freely rotatable in 3D space. And as we will enhance our Javascript with some touch-interactivity, the packshot will also work nicely in Safari for iOS-platforms like iPhone or iPad.

CSS Drop-Shadows Without ImagesNicolas Gallagher shares presents his CSS drop-shadows without any images.

Incrementable Length Values in Text FieldsLea Verou explains how to implement a feature that allows you to increment or decrement a <length> value by pressing the up and down keyboard arrows when the caret is over it.

Beveled Corners & Negative Border-Radius with CSS3 GradientsBeveled corners and simulate negative border radius without images, by utilizing CSS3 gradients once again — Lea Verou is amazed by how many CSS problems can be solved with gradients alone. Works on Firefox 3.6+, latest Webkit Nightly builds, Chrome and Opera 11.10.

Flexible Height Vertical Centering With CSS, Beyond IE7Roger Johansson shares his thoughts on how to improve centering an element both horizontally and vertically with the display:table alternative.

Coding up a semantic, lean timelineThis article tells you how to create a semantic lean timeline.

CSS Border Tricks with Collapsed BoxesThese border tricks tricks will help you to display content outside of the content box, over borders, without the use of images, CSS3 gradients or extraneous markup.

Quick Tip: Nonintrusive CSS Text GradientsJeffrey Way shows some ways for creating pure CSS text-gradients with a bit of trickery. The key is to use a mix of attribute selectors, webkit-specific properties, and custom HTML attributes.

Bokeh with CSS3 GradientsDivya Manian uses the CSS gradients and shows the results of his work on a project which uses a bunch of circles as a decorative background.

Different Transitions for Hover On / Hover OffChris Coyier tries to acchieve “different transitions on mouseenter and mouseleave”, but he isn’t using JavaScript here; we’re talking about CSS :hover state and CSS3 transitions. Hover on, some CSS property animates itself to a new value; hover off, a different CSS property animates.

Styling children based on their number, with CSS3Lea Verou shows how to style children of elements based on their total number (that is, their total count).

CSS ModalUsing CSS3 tech­niques a modal box can be cre­ated with­out JavaScript or images. With a bit of ani­ma­tion, tran­si­tion and trans­form, it can be made that lit­tle bit more special. The problem: when you hit the “Back”-button after the modal has popped up and was closed, you’ll see the modal again. But maybe you’ll come with a way to fix it?

Rotating Feature BoxesThe full effect of it (with transition animations) will work in newish WebKit and Opera browsers and Firefox 4 (in real beta as of today). Any other browser will rotate the blocks without transition animation.

When and How to Visually Hide ContentVisually hiding content on a web page, usually textual content, is at times a viable technique in web design and development. It can be done for several reasons, most importantly, to improve the experience of a screen reader user. Other reasons include improving readability when CSS cannot be rendered, and improving search engine optimization (SEO). Other exaples about using the Visually Hide Content are shown in this article.

How to avoid common CSS3 mistakesThe new features of CSS3 bring with them complexity and new things for us to screw up. This article will help keep us in check as we start using these new features.

Introduction to CSS Escape SequencesEscape sequences are useful because they allow style sheet authors to represent characters that would normally be ignored or interpreted differently by traditional CSS parsing rules. In this article Mert Tol shows how to use these sequences.

Wrapping Long URLs and Text Content with CSSTo wrap long URLs, strings of text, and other content, you can just apply a carefully crafted chunk of CSS code to any block-level element .

CSS Generated ContentTrevor Davis shows on some examples what you can do with the CSS generated content.

Controlling width with CSS3 box-sizingAn incredibly useful CSS3 feature when you’re creating columns with floats is box-sizing. It lets you choose which box sizing model to use – whether or not an element’s width and height include padding and border or not. It makes it much easier to define flexible widths where you also need padding and/or borders. A typical example is laying out forms, which can be a real pain when you want flexible widths.

Revisit Hardboiled CSS3 Media QueriesShi Chuan takes a close look at boilerplates and helps us understand the math we need to tweak the width required for a good resolution to any particular device.
iPad Orientation CSSKeith Chu revises Cloud Four’s work and finds a way to alleviate extra HTTP requests, not iPad-specific as well as lack of reusability. In this post, he shares with us his proposed revision to the iPad orientation CSS.
CSS Value Lengths, Times, Frequencies and AnglesIn this article the authors go over all the math type units that can be applied as property values in CSS.
CSS Tools320 and up‘320 and Up’ prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point. Try this page at different window sizes and on different devices to see it in action.

CSS3 Generator – By Eric Hoffman and Peter FunkThis generator was proudly designed by Eric Hoffman and coded by Peter Funk.

CSS Pattern GeneratorPatternify is a simple pattern generator that enables you to not only build your patterns online, but export them with the base64 code, so you don’t even need an image file anymore. Just include the code in your CSS and you’re ready to go. Created by Sacha Greif.

Griddle.it – Web page alignment made easyA clean and simple way to help align your layouts. No complex grid frameworks necessary.Just put your dimensions after our URL to get a background guide image to work with in your browser. Grids are created on the fly, so any combination should work.

The 1140px Grid: Fluid down to mobileThe 1140 grid fits perfectly into a 1280 monitor. On smaller monitors it becomes fluid and adapts to the width of the browser.

Fighting the @font-face FOUTPaul Irish’s 2011 update for the @font-face FOUT issue. Good news: Firefox 4 has no FOUT, IE9 does, and FOUT-b-GONE will help you out with that.

CSS3 Github ButtonsCSS3 Buttons is a simple framework for creating good-looking GitHub style button links.

CSS3 Facebook ButtonsCSS3 Facebook Buttons

MinimeeOn the Internets, speed is everything – which means that when it comes t[…]

  This article is an excerpt from Eric Meyer’s recent book Smashing CSS, published by Wiley in cooperation with Smashing Magazine.
In this article, the focus is on what’s coming: styling techniques you’ll use in the immediate and near-term future. From styling HTML 5 elements to rearranging layout based on display parameters to crazy selection patterns to transforming element layout, these are all techniques that you may use tomorrow, next month, or next year. With partial browser support, they’re all on the cutting edge of Web design.
Accordingly, be careful not to get cut! A number of useful sites can help you figure out the exact syntaxes and patterns you need to use these techniques.
Furthermore, a number of JavaScript libraries can extend support for advanced CSS back into older browsers, in some cases as far back as IE/Win 5.5. Some are very narrowly focused on certain browser families, whereas others are more broadly meant to allow support in all known browsers. These can be useful in cases where your visitors haven’t quite caught up with the times but you don’t want them to miss out on all the fun. (Some of these libraries are CSS3 PIE, cssSandpaper, :select[ivizr], ie7-js, eCSStender).
There are also a good many CSS enhancements available as plug-ins for popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery. If you’re a user of such a library, definitely do some digging to see what’s been created. Again: Be careful! While these techniques are powerful and can deliver a lot of power to your pages, you need to test them thoroughly in the browsers of the day to make sure you didn’t just accidentally make the page completely unreadable in older browsers.
Styling HTML 5Styling HTML 5 is really no different than styling HTML 4. There are a bunch of new elements, but styling them is basically the same as styling any other element. They generate the same boxes as any other div, span, h2, a, or what have you.
The HTML 5 specification is still being worked on as of this writing, so this may change a bit over time, but the following declarations may be of use to older browsers that don’t know quite what to do with the new elements.

article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section, summary {
display: block;
}
command, datalist, keygen, mark, meter, progress, rp, rt, ruby, time, wbr {
display: inline;
}
You may have noticed that I left out two fairly important new elements: audio and video. That’s because it’s hard to know exactly how to treat them. Block? Inline? All depends on how you plan to use them. Anyway, you can place them in the declaration that makes the most sense to you.
But what about really old browsers, like IE6? (Note I said “old,” not “unused.” In an interesting subversion of popular culture, browser popularity has very little to do with age.) For those, you need to use a bit of JavaScript in order to get the browser to recognize them and therefore be able to style them. There’s a nice little script that auto-forces old versions of IE to play nicely with HTML 5 elements. If you’re going to use and style them, you should definitely grab that script and put it to use.
Once you’ve gotten your browser ducks in a row and quacking “The Threepenny Opera,” you can get down to styling. Remember: There’s really nothing new about styling with these new elements. For example:

figure {
float: left;
border: 1px solid gray;
padding: 0.25em;
margin: 0 0 1.5em 1em;
}
figcaption {
text-align: center;
font: italic 0.9em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

<img src="splash.jpg" alt="A toddler’s face is obscured by a rippled and dimpled wall of water thrown up by her hands slapping into the surface of the swimming pool in whose waters she sits.">
SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH!!!

Figure 7-1: A styled HTML 5 figure and figure caption.
Classing like HTML 5Perhaps you like the new semantics of HTML 5, but you’re just not ready to take your sites to full-on HTML 5. Maybe your site’s user base is mostly older browsers and you’d rather stick to known quantities like HTML 4 or XHTML. Not to worry: You can have the best of both worlds with the venerable class attribute.
This approach was documented by Jon Tan in his article. The basic idea is to use old-school elements like div and span, and add to them classes that exactly mirror the element names in HTML 5. Here’s a code example.

.figure {
float: left;
border: 1px solid gray;
padding: 0.25em;
margin: 0 0 1.5em 1em;
}
.figcaption {
text-align: center;
font: italic 0.9em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

<img src="spring.jpg" alt="A small child with twin pigtail braids, her back to the camera, swings away from the camera on a playground swingset while the late afternoon sun peeks over the crossbar of the swingset.">
<div class="figcaption">Swinging into spring.</div>

Figure 7-2: A styled HTML 4-classed figure and figure caption.
If you compare the styles there to those found in the preceding section, you’ll see that the only difference is that the names figure and figcaption are preceded by periods — thus marking them as class names. The markup is a little different, of course, though it’s the same basic structure.
The advantage of this approach is that if you have these styles in place at the point when you decide you can convert to HTML 5, then all you need to do is change your markup to use HTML 5 elements instead of classed divs and then strip off the periods to turn the class selectors into element selectors. That’s it. Easy as cake!
Media QueriesThis could honestly be its own article, or possibly even its own book. Thus, what follows will necessarily be just a brief taste of the possibilities. You should definitely follow up with more research, because in a lot of ways this is the future of Web styling.
The point of media queries is to set up conditional blocks of styles that will apply in different media environments. For example, you could write one set of styles for portrait displays and another for landscape displays. You might change the colors based on the bit depth of the display. You could change the font based on the pixel density of display. You might even rearrange the page’s layout depending on the width or number of pixels available in the display.
Figure 7-3: A basic three-column layout.
How? Consider some basic layout styles for a three-column layout:

body {
background: #FFF;
color: #000;
font: small Arial, sans-serif;
}
.col {
position: relative;
margin: 3em 1%;
padding: 0.5em 1.5%;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
float: right;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
width: 40%;
}
#footer {
clear: both;
}
As nice as this might be (in a minimalist sort of way), it is likely to run into trouble on smaller—which is to say, narrower—displays. What if you could magically change to a two-column layout on such displays?
Well, you can. First, restrict the three-column layout to environments that are more than 800 pixels across. This is done by splitting the layout bits into their own declarations:

body {
background: #fff;
color: #000;
font: small Arial, sans-serif;
}
.col {
position: relative;
margin: 3em 1%;
padding: 0.5em 1.5%;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
}
#footer {
clear: both;
}
.col {
float: right;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
width: 40%;
}
Then wrap those last two declarations in a media query:

@media all and (min-width: 800px) {
.col {
float: right;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
width: 40%;
}
}
What that says is “the rules inside this curly-brace block apply in all media that have a minimum display width of 800 pixels.” Anything below that, no matter the medium, and the rules inside the block will be ignored. Note the parentheses around the min-width term and its value. These are necessary any time you have a term and value (which are referred to as an expression).
At this point, nothing will really change unless you shrink the browser window until it offers fewer than 800 pixels across to the document. At that point, the columns stop floating altogether.
Figure 7-4: What happens below 800 pixels.
What you can do at this point is write another media-query block of layout rules that apply in narrower conditions. Say you want a two-column layout between 500 and 800 pixels):

@media all and (min-width: 500px) and (max-width: 799px) {
.col {
float: left;
width: 20%;
}
#two {
float: right;
width: 69%;
}
#three {
clear: left;
margin-top: 0;
}
}
Figure 7-5: The reworked layout, which shows between 500 and 800 pixels.
And finally, you can apply some single-column styles for any medium with fewer than 500 pixels of display width:

@media all and (max-width: 499px) {
#one {
text-align: center;
}
#one li {
display: inline;
list-style: none;
padding: 0 0.5em;
border-right: 1px solid gray;
line-height: 1.66;
}
#one li:last-child {
border-right: 0;
}
#three {
display: none;
}
}
Figure 7-6: Single-column layout, which shows below 500 pixels.
Note that in all these queries, layout styles are defined in relation to the display area of the browser window. More generically, they are defined in relation to the display area available to the document in any medium in which it is rendered. That means that if a printer, for example, is used to print the document and it has an available display area 784 pixels wide, then the two-column layout will be for printing.
To restrict the column shifting to screen media only, alter the queries, like so:

@media screen and (min-width: 800px) {...}
@media screen and (min-width: 500px) and (max-width: 799px) {...}
@media screen and (max-width: 499px) {...}
But what if you want the three-column layout used in some non-screen media, like print and TV displays? Then add in th[…]