Design Festival is a web design site with CSS tutorials, design inspiration, and articles on landing pages and backgrounds.
HN links it for its Cicada principle background patterns and landing page reviews, and one commenter lists it among web design resources.
http://designfestival.com/
http://blog.typekit.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://methodandcraft.com/
http://webdesignerwall.com/
http://www.netmagazine.com/
http://webdesignledger.com/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/
Should be enough to get you started.
This sounds like a similar article from Design Festival:
Attributes of Effective Landing Pages: 10 Landing Page Reviews
(http://designfestival.com/10-landing-page-reviews/)
Hah, went to reread that page and the first thing it mentions now is just such a project: http://designfestival.com/cicada/