One of the most useful front-end development techniques of recent years is the humble “CSS Sprites”. The technique was popularised by Dave Shea on A List Apart in 2004 with his article CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. CSS Sprites are a relatively simple technique once you understand the fundamentals and it can be applied in all manner of ways. A common use is for a graphic intensive navigation, but it can also be useful for buttons or even styling headings with the corporate font.

Sprites are simply a collection of images which are merged together to create a single file. You then use CSS, changing the background-position the image, to display the correct part of the image you need. I often use the analogy of a large object passing a window — you only see what is within the frame.

Over the last couple of years CSS Sprites has been one of the most widely adopted CSS-related techniques. Popularised by the Yahoo’s research and documentation around speeding up your website, many high profile websites implement the technique, including Google and Amazon. There are numerous tutorials which help you get to grips with the techniques and sprite generators which help you create the graphics themselves.

These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure aesthetic purposes. We see fewer “pure CSS images” and more advanced, clever CSS techniques that can actually improve the Web browsing experience of users. And that’s a good thing!

In this post we present recently released CSS techniques, tutorials and tools for you to use and enhance your workflow, thus improving your skills. 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 JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well.

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CSS3 continues to both excite and frustrate web designers and developers. We are excited about the possibilities that CSS3 brings, and the problems it will solve, but also frustrated by the lack of support in Internet Explorer 8. This article will demonstrate a technique that uses part of CSS3 that is also unsupported by Internet Explorer 8. However, it doesn’t matter as one of the most useful places for this module is somewhere that does have a lot of support – small devices such as the iPhone, and Android devices.

In this article I’ll explain how, with a few CSS rules, you can create an iPhone version of your site using CSS3, that will work now. We’ll have a look at a very simple example and I’ll also discuss the process of adding a small screen device stylesheet to my own site to show how easily we can add stylesheets for mobile devices to existing websites.

To get you really excited about CSS3, last month we announced the CSS3 Design Contest and encouraged designers to experiment and get creative with CSS3. As expected, we have received many creative and original submissions. To choose the winners of the contest, we considered the originality of the technique or approach and its uniqueness. The idea mattered more than the execution.

This process has taken a lot of time as it wasn’t easy, because we received quite a few creative submissions: however, a decision had to be taken and so we thoroughly went from one competition entry to another. And the decision was made. So today, it’s time to announce the winners and present the submissions to the contest.

Please notice that the contest results are experimental and may not necessarily look or work alike in different browsers. The techniques presented below should be considered as innovative, creative approaches showcasing what can be achieved with pure CSS3 and a bit of creative thinking. Please feel free to build upon these ideas to create further techniques and design solutions and make them available for the design community.