Comment by Todd on "Why are people Drawing in CSS?"

Practicing CSS skills. While it may not serve "real world use," it's still a way to dig deep into CSS and learn a few things that could be used in the "real world."
In fact, Lea Verou does just that and she's a PhD CompSci researcher at MIT, as well as a creator of CSS itself and author of the 5-star book CSS Secrets. Lastly, she has dozens of Youtube videos demoing this kind of stuff. It goes deeper than just 'screwing around,' she studies pixels, color, and how they relate not just to the human eye, but to computer science as a whole.
It's faster and often desirable to use versus, say, images made from Photoshop. CSS often loads quicker than images on a page do, and CSS doesn't have that "boxy" and non-responsive quality that loading an image on a page does. Plus, CSS is just text and it gets rendered on the client-side, meaning it saves a ton of bandwidth versus images.
People are creative and artistic in general. Have you heard of chainsaw sculptures? :)
That all said, I hate CSS and I suck at it... But I respect those who are skilled and enjoy using it to the point that I often love looking at what they come up with.

CSS often loads quicker than images on a page do

I disagree. An image, encoded in a proper (binary) format, will load faster than text, because

CSS has to be parsed, interpreted and calculated, while images only have to be transformed binary2binary into a texture buffer and then rendered to the screen.
many image formats use mipmapping to present low-quality images fast and then improve the quality, which CSS again cannot serve (it has to be loaded and then displayed).
CSS was not made for creating images. CSS is text and text is bulky and large (and bad for a computer to handle)

CSS has other advantages and I would rather compare it to SVG written in an editor than to images made in Photoshop...

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