With Fronteers (the Dutch trade organization for front-end web developers) we've been running a forum thread for such CSS logos for the last year and a half - h

With Fronteers (the Dutch trade organization for front-end web developers) we've been running a forum thread for such CSS logos for the last year and a half - http://forum.fronteers.nl/topic/24/the-css-challenge/ http://forum.fronteers.nl/topic/24/the-css-challenge/ - conversation in Dutch, but the images and jsfiddle links should speak for themselves - and I personally think the chief benefit in this exercise comes from the process of _creating_ such a logo. When you're looking at the end result, you might be mildly impressed by the versatility of CSS, or dismiss it as a rather pointless exercise for the real world (both of which are quite valid points of view), but when you're actually looking at a new logo and pondering how you'd approach the process of recreating it in pure CSS, you'll be triggered to dig deeper into CSS than you'd do during the ordinary course of web development work. The amount of value gained from that is hard to overstate. I've recently been teaching someone completely new to web development the principles of HTML and CSS, and she's been picking it up pretty swiftly, but otherwise not doing much with it which was terribly noteworthy. Until I loosened restraints, and got her interested in just playing with some new techniques for the sake of playing (which included that CSS challenge). Suddenly she was doing things I'd never seen before, layering radial and linear gradients for some cool effects, transforming and animating the result, and just bringing it all together in wildly innovative ways. (It helps that she has no idea about the bad old days where we were all incredibly restrained by limited browser support.) :) For the CSS challenge she had a definite goal, and I could just see her conceptual thinking leaping ahead as she bounced ideas off of me on how to reach that goal. In the process of this all she discovered two browser bugs (will still get her to file them after making certain they won't be dupes), gained a much, much deeper understanding of the finer points of various CSS3 modules, and had her self-confidence boosted a lot by knowing that she could really figure out these things and create something which would've seemed like magic to her just weeks earlier. I highly recommend any- and everyone to, when it's not immediately obvious how a particular logo was constructed, pick it apart and _see_ the way certain effects are combined. Expand your thinking. Yes, there's an obvious way to build up your basic CSS for a bread-and-butter website, which just works, and there's often not much challenge or versatility there (nor needed). But the techniques and capabilities at the forefront of CSS are changing and expanding rapidly, and more and more of these techniques do actually become quite applicable to ordinary websites. Not in the particular combinations found in a CSS logo, but still in forms which will bear an uncanny resemblance to them. Why not have some fun teaching yourself about them? It's good to every so often remind yourself that you're in a very creative field of work, which keeps changing rapidly.