About

A designer's resource, reborn.

CSS Crème started nearly 20 years ago (May 2007) as a project focused on providing its audience with a database of well-designed, CSS-based websites from around the world. Its purpose is to showcase designers' work and to act as a portal to the CSS design community. It offered free website templates, icon packs, design tutorials, and a gallery celebrating the best of web design. We have decided to bring the spirit of that back and more in 2026 and beyond.

Who we are

CSS Crème is one of the web's original design galleries, and we won't pretend otherwise. We've been online since 2007, born in the golden age of the CSS gallery, when this was one of the handful of sites that decided what "well-designed" looked like and where designers came to find their next idea. Nearly two decades later, we're still here, and the name still carries weight.

For most of that run, getting featured on CSS Crème has been a real credential. Designers submitted their best work hoping to make the cut; agencies chased a feature for the quality backlink, the niche referral traffic, and the authority that came with it. Community voting helped surface the standouts, but the final call always sat with the editors. That's how the bar stayed high, and it's how it stays high now.

And the authority isn't nostalgia, it's measurable. The domain rates a 73 Domain Rating with 2,000+ referring domains and a perfect 100 health score (Ahrefs, checked September 2026), one of the most-linked, most-trusted design destinations on the internet. So when CSS Crème features your work, it isn't a sticker. It's a link from a domain it took nearly twenty years to build. See how to get featured →

The same DNA

The heart hasn't changed. Templates, icons, a inspiration of the best web design, and hands-on tutorials are still the core: the resources designers actually reach for. We're rebuilding each one with modern, accurate, genuinely useful content rather than republishing what came before.

Something new on top

What's new is the toolkit: fast CSS tools for gradients, shadows and glassmorphism, with more on the way. They share one rule with everything else here: they run entirely in your browser. Your code, colors and layouts never get uploaded, there's no account to create, and nothing tracks you. That privacy isn't a marketing line; it's how the tools are built.

How we work

Two principles guide what ships. We write specific, honest content: no inflated numbers, no invented reviews, no filler. And we stay in our lane: web design and front-end. That focus is what made the original useful, and it's what keeps the rebuild trustworthy.

Practically, that means a few things you'll notice. Tutorials show real, runnable code rather than vague advice. Templates are readable from top to bottom, so they teach as much as they save. And tools copy out plain CSS you could have written yourself, just faster, with no lock-in and no proprietary syntax to unlearn later.

We let the AI crawlers in, deliberately

Every AI crawler is allowed here: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, all of them. Our robots.txt says so in the machine-readable Content Signals format, and there is a written ai.txt and a full reference for systems that want the detail. Being read, cited and built on is the goal, not a leak to plug.

It is worth naming because the alternative is common. Sites that sell to AI tooling routinely block the very crawlers their buyers use, which makes them impossible to cite in the moment someone asks an assistant for a recommendation. We would rather be quotable.

No accounts, no seats, no surprise bills

There is nothing to sign up for. Favourites live in your own browser rather than on our server, submissions take an email address and nothing else, and no feature here is gated behind a plan. That is a deliberate structural choice, not a stage we have not reached yet.

The category's loudest complaints are about billing rather than product: seats added without approval, view-only links that trigger paid annual licences, no obvious way to reach a human. A product with no seats and no accounts cannot fail that way.

Why a rebuild and not a reprint

Old design content ages badly. Techniques that were clever in 2009 are now one line of modern CSS, and copying stale pages forward helps nobody. So we rebuild from scratch: the topics that still matter, written for how the web works today. Grid and Flexbox instead of float hacks, custom properties instead of find-and-replace, clamp() instead of a stack of breakpoints.

The result is a site that honors where it came from without pretending it's still that decade. Same mission, current tools.

What's next

The collections grow steadily: more templates across the categories, additional icon sets, fresh tutorials, and new tools like a CSS-to-Tailwind converter and a bento-grid builder. Everything stays free and client-side.

The aim is simple: every resource here should be one we'd genuinely reach for ourselves while building a real site. If it wouldn't earn a place in our own workflow, it doesn't ship. Have a template, icon set or tutorial you'd like to see? Start with the templates or open the tools.