craigsimps

Widgetized themes often include support for adding a featured page or post, but often there’s no easy way to feature a category from your blog.
With Featured Category Widget you can easily featured a blog category (or a category from a custom taxonomy, like products), add a custom image and optionally show the category description and a list of sub categories.
Features:
<ul>
<li>Add custom image and set display size.</li>
<li>Optionally show category description and/or subcategories.</li>
<li>Supports custom taxonomies.</li>
<li>Developer friendly hooks and filters throughout.</li>
<li>Translated into French, Spanish, German.</li>
</ul>

Featured Category Widget

Showcase a specific category with ease, including setting a featured image and listing child categories.

alaingg

This is a menu that uses the images attached to the posts/pages galleries as items background. You can insert the menu wherever you want: into the content, in your theme files and as a widgets. Visit the <a href="http://web-argument.com/category/accordion-image-menu-2/" rel="nofollow ugc">plugin page</a> for demos and details.
Special Features:
<ul>
<li>Allows to combine pages and categories and apply order to them</li>
<li>Its integrated with the wordpress > 3.0 menus interface</li>
<li>The plugin uses the post feature image or the medium size image attached to post and pages</li>
<li>The menu uses the top image from the posts/pages gallery</li>
<li>You can use it to list recent posts</li>
<li>Multiple transition effects included (Elastic, Bounce, Sine, Pow, Quart, Back, Circ)</li>
<li>You can include ‘the title’ of the target pages</li>
<li>Allows to include multiple menus on your blog </li>
<li>The menu can be based on posts/pages ids</li>
<li>Compatible with: Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE 7, 8, 9</li>
</ul>

Accordion Image Menu

Accordion Image Menu that allows to use the images attached to the posts and pages galleries as background.

Featured Category Widget vs Accordion Image Menu