[Sakes]

It sounds like you are more interested in design than the implementation of it.

For great looking buttons/fields you just need to be sensitive to font selection, padding, borders, & colors.

1) Refer to apps / sites that you think are beautiful

2) Dissect them for:

- Color palettes

- horizontal padding

- vertical padding

- margins sizes

- border thicknesses

- font stacks

- font sizes

3) always build on top of a css framework such as bootstrap

4) implement design tweaks referring to your notes of other apps you wish to imitate.

[teleclimber]

Yep totally. OP wants to "get better at CSS" but says they want ".. great looking buttons.."

Making things look great is more about an affinity for design than knowledge of fancy CSS.

OP, you might want to hang out on news.layervault.com in addition to HN. You can learn a lot by examining what gets shared and the comments.