10 Tasty Textures For Your Background

By Scott Stanton | One comment | Inspiration, Photoshop, Roundups

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More often than not, when I’m developing a website, I favor pictures and solid colors.  But every now and then I’ll come across a project where those just won’t cut it, the site either winds up looking too neutral and boring, or there is a large amount of text and a background image makes it too difficult to read.  The result is me going on a pilgrimage across the internet to find the perfect background image that can tile itself seamlessly.  Let’s take a look at a few of the nicer ones that I’ve come across over the years.

GypsyGarden

GypsyGarden is a nice choice for anyone looking to create a festive, spring website, a garden boutique site, or even a blog for landscape designers.  You could easily layer a solid color background over the top of this for displaying text, without interrupting the look.

Seamless Paper Patterns

Paper patterns can come in quite handy from time to time.  I know I’ve used them before on projects and really liked how they turned out.  This package includes 6 different textures, a few different grid paper options, some grungy looking paper, and standard lined paper.  Each texture is a 1024 x 1024 px grid.

Vivid Red

Vivid Red provides nice, rich, dark, earthy tones that will breathe a little life in to the design of your site.  The nice thing about these patterns is that they’re rather neutral and aren’t geared toward any specific season, industry, or anything like that.

Grungy Teal

Grungy Teal offers a nice array of blues to add some color and character to your site.  Much like the Vivid Red textures above, the patterns are mostly shapes and inanimate objects that don’t limit you to anything too specific.  This is a pack of 5 seamless textures that come in 1024 x 1024 px grids.

Blue Retro Fabric

Blue retro fabric is a great way to incorporate some texture in to the design of your site as well as inject a lot of blue.  There are 5 textures in this package and each one has an extremely high resolution 3600 x 3600 image file that you can use.  The total file size of the package is 18.4 MB.

Cherry Blossom Pattern

With spring upon us and summer rapidly approaching, this cherry blossom pattern is a great way to liven up your website or blog.  The colors are bright and festive and will surely evoke a happy feeling in people visiting your site.  This background comes in a high resolution 2000 x 2000 px grid.

Texture Stripes

I don’t know how crazy I am about a site having a full background of these texture stripes, but I think they could work quite nicely as a background to a boarder area to help separate one content section from another.  There are 6 patterns in this zip file for your own personal enjoyment.

Softly Plaidly Peachy Keen

Softly Plaidly Peachy Keen may be a mouthful to say, but it’s a robust package of plaid backgrounds to spruce up your blog or website.  The package contains 11 different patterns, which you get in two different sizes, to make a grand total of 22 patterns!

115 Different Textures

If you’re all about getting the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to download this zip file full of 115 different textures. From brick walls and wood fences, to grass lawns and obscure textures, each one is categorized within the zip file and will tile seamlessly.

Metal Grid Patterns

I’ve also had a lot of luck using metal grid patterns in designs before.  Whether they fill up the entirety of the sites background, or are subtly overlaid a content area or image.  They often add a nice subtle texture to a site to help it stick out above the rest.  There are 8 different textures in this package.

About the author: with over ten years in the freelance web design and writing fields, Scott Stanton has had his finger on the beating pulse of the industry’s hottest design trends and bends for the past decade. Scott regularly writes for Wix.com the free website builder. Follow him on Twitter @TheScottStanton.