55 + 1 Sources for Web Design Inspiration

In 2009 I posted a list of 56 CSS galleries and web-design inspiration sources. Nearly two decades later it’s a museum piece — most of the sites are gone, but a surprising number still work, and the survivors are listed below with their status as of 2026. If you’re hunting for design inspiration today, the 30 sites that still resolve are at the bottom of the history lesson.

The original 56, and where they went

The 2000s were the golden age of the “CSS gallery”: sites that showcased well-built standards-compliant designs, one screenshot per entry. CSS Zen Garden kicked the trend off in 2003, and for a few years these galleries were the way designers found each other’s work. Then they died of a thousand cuts — domain lapses (CSS Hazard, CSS Bloom, Light on Dark), pivots into paid directories that went nowhere (Style Grind, Most Inspired), and the real killer: feeds like Pinterest, Dribbble, Behance and Awwwards made manual submission galleries feel ancient.

Out of the 56 links in the original list, 26 are dead today. The graves include some famous names:

• CSS Drive — dead. A lesson in short-lived branding: the domain lapsed years ago (the name now belongs to a CSS framework).
• Style Gala — the archetypal 2005-era gallery, gone.
• CSS Reboot — the twice-yearly “redesign your site on the same day” event that generated half of these galleries’ content. Dead with the event.
• The Best Designs, CSS Hazard, CSS Bloom, Style Crunch, CSS Flavor, Screenalicio.us, Light on Dark, CSS Galaxy, Perfection, CSS Thesis — all defunct galleries.
• Studio7Designs, Six Shooter Media, The Dreamer, One Pixel Army, The Pixel Creativity, Creative Pakistan, 3point7designs, WebDigity, Inspiration King, Glenn Wolsey’s blog, Silent Bits — defunct studios and blogs.

The survivors (all verified 2026)

These 30 still respond, and a good chunk are still worth a bookmark:

• CSS Zen Garden — alive and unchanged, deliberately. Still the best demonstration that structure and presentation can be separated.
• Smashing Magazine’s 2007 gallery roundup — Smashing itself thrives; this specific 2007 showcase survives as a period piece. Their modern design category is the living successor.
• Unmatched Style — one of the few galleries still actively showcasing sites.
• Web Creme — another long-running survivor.
• Design Shack — evolved from a gallery into a full design/CSS publication.
• CSS Mania — the once-huge Spanish gallery is still up.
• CSS Elite, CSS Import, CSS Remix, CSSClip, CSS Beauty, CSS Gallery, CSS Galleries, CSS Websites, Screen Fluent, StyleBoost — archived but reachable galleries; useful as design history.
• The FWA — the Flash-era showcase somehow outlived Flash and still awards sites daily.
• 2Advanced Studios — the legendary 2000s agency site is still online.
• Andreas Viklund’s templates — the open-source template kingpin still distributes them.
• DeviantArt Designs, the Flickr inspiration photoset — community sources, both still live.
• Open Source Web Design, Open Source Templates, Templates Box, OSWT — free-template archives, mostly 2000s designs, all reachable.
• Drupal Sites, Go Drupal, Beautifully Webdesign, Website Design Awards — niche showcases, still up.

What to use instead in 2026

If you landed here looking for inspiration sources, the honest modern answer isn’t a CSS gallery at all:

• Awwwards and CSS Design Awards — the direct, still-thriving descendants of this whole genre.
• Dribbble, Behance, Pinterest — where design discovery moved.
• Godly, siteInspire, Land-book, Lapa Ninja — the current generation of curated galleries (the latter two especially for landing pages).
• Mobbin — the same idea applied to mobile UI patterns.

And if you want to see the 2009 web the way it looked, paste any of the dead URLs above into the Wayback Machine — every one of them was archived.