Tonttu

Tonttu is a useful application that was designed in order to assist you in making CSS Sprite images. You will be able to arrange and move your image files with Tonttu, and it end up writting a html and css files with CSS Sprite Image. You can also save as a project file (.ttd) in order to start exact same screen next time.

Think of CSS Sprites as an extension of that technique. The difference is that instead of just two or three images being combined into one, you can combine an unlimited number of images into one. The origin of the term "sprites" comes from old school computer graphics and the video game industry.

The idea was that the computer could fetch a graphic into memory, and then only display parts of that image at a time, which was faster than having to continually fetch new images. The sprite was the big combined graphic.

CSS Sprites is pretty much the exact same theory: get the image once, shift it around and only display parts of it, saves the overhead of having to fetch multiple images.