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Web Design Backgrounds
Backgrounds are an interesting way to customize a website, however it’s not an easy task to create and to implement an image as we have seen in a recent 8×8 pixel Workshop.
Nevertheless, with a little effort everything is possible with Photoshop or GIMP. The first question is about your personal preferences; what’s your style?
Here are three of my preferred background patterns:
- satin
carbon
grunge
Satin Background
This background type gives the impression of a cloth with it’s folds; a background which works well in light and very light colors.
Background Satin
This is a simple background I created with Photoshop (same in GIMP). Create a new image, select the gradient tool, punch in some lines and then add Gaussian blur to it, stylize to find the edges. Finally play with the HUE for the color. Done.
Background Satin Blue
You can then apply any color you want and tan to taste.
Such backgrounds can be used for ‘elegant’ sites, for luxury product presentation or simply as banner backgrounds.
Carbon Backgrounds
These backgrounds are more trendy and i like them for their texture. They are relatively easy to fabricate as you just need to paint a few pixels with some gray to black tones on a small square, similar to our 8×8 pixel exercise.
Here is an example based on a 4×4 pixel pattern, whereas I have split the pixels to get a 8 x 8 grid. The final result is a 4 x 4 pixels background image.
Step 1: Zoom your 4 x 4 pixel image to 1600% and paint it as follows:
Carbon Pattern 4 x 4 pixels
The colors are (right column top to bottom): #202020, #000000, #656565, #3d3d3d – apply accordingly to the right column as well.
The zoomed pattern is:
Carbon 1600% Zoom
The final result is:
Carbon 4x4 pixels Pattern
Carbons are nice trendy background patterns, easy to design and to modify to low contrast backgrounds.
Some other examples:
Carbon diagonal
Elegant Carbon
Grunge Backgrounds
The trendiest of the three is grunge style. This is really stuff that’s in, cool and exciting to work with. Grungy backgrounds are not just patterns, it’s pure creativity, from the choice of colors, to the texture like stone or concrete, to the grunge strokes with our brushes to finally create that special effect you want to have.
Here just a quick example:
Grunge Background
For creative minds, the grunge style is the most exciting as there is virtually no limit. Grunge style can be extremely elegant as it can be complete trash – it’s just about the best fun in background design.
To produce this, I have selected a background color, applied a clouds filter and a 65% soft-light fade. Then I added some noise before going wild with some grunge brush strokes. Finally I put the layer opacity to 40% and applied a YORGO Artist Stamp. Done.
What are your preferred backgrounds?
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Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics.
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