What's an image sprite?

An image sprite is a single asset located within an image sprite sheet. An image sprite sheet is an image file that contains more than one asset that can be extracted from it.

For example:

(opens new window)

The image above is an image sprite sheet, and each one of those stars is a sprite within the sprite sheet. These sprite sheets are useful because they improve performance by reducing the number of HTTP requests a browser might have to make.

So how do you implement one? Here's some example code.

HTML

<div class="icon icon1"></div>
<div class="icon icon2"></div>
<div class="icon icon3"></div>

CSS

.icon {
    background: url(“icons-sprite.png”);
    display: inline-block;
    height: 20px;
    width: 20px;
}
.icon1 {
      background-position: 0px 0px;
}
.icon2 {
      background-position: -20px 0px;
}
.icon3 {
      background-position: -40px 0px;
}

By using setting the sprite's width and height and by using the background-position property in CSS (with an x and y value) you can easily extract sprites from a sprite sheet using CSS.

Syntax

Remarks

For some use cases, sprites are slowly falling out of favor, being replaced by icon webfonts or SVG images (opens new window).