There is a huge community around website colors, palettes and patterns over at http://colourlovers.com . You can also create your own starting from scratch or from already existing patterns.
This is really awesome. Just an hour ago my wife and I were scanning through an extensive collection of tile-able background images she stumbled onto (http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/). While I really liked a lot of the background images there, what I really love about the images in the OP is that they're friendly to content areas with text.
This has always been the hardest part for me, finding a subtle background pattern that gives a little more than a flat color, but that doesn't have too much contrast such that it draws the eye from the text. I'm glad to have found a resource specifically designed for this common need.
The license is pretty confusing:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The patterns can be used freely in both personal and commercial projects with no attribution required, but always appreciated.
Am I required to adhere to the CC-BY license or does the second part indeed cancel the BY requirement?
That was my initial thought. I think as the CC-BY states that the attribution must be made in accordance with the wishes of the author then the second part effectively modifies the attribution to make it optional. I'd have thought that could be defended well in a court of law.
In this case, what is the point of the CC-BY license at all?
Additionally, artists who submit their textures to the site only license it under CC-BY [1]. This means that the website's operator may not actually waive the Attribution requirement.
I have contacted the website operator to clear this up.
[1] actually, the submission form says "You also agree to let me license the pattern as Creative Commons – in other words, give it away to the world for free. " This is quire ambiguous.
It looks to me that the Attribution is only conditionally waived. That is to say, if you're using it you don't have to add the attribution but if you're sharing it or a remix of it the attribution is still required.
If only someone would come up with a collection of standard licenses covering all the reasonable scenarios with both good legal language and an understandable summary.
For our second site, we went with a different approach and designed it from scratch as a learning exercise. One of the experimental techniques we sweated over for hours and hours was using textures.
Not a bad idea, I'll talk it over with my co-founder about making the change.
We're trying to keep it as clean as possible, but I think you're right, we went overboard in exchange for burying an important data point behind another click.
Feature request: If there's a slider with the thumbnails of all the textures which can be browsed in single page, that would make the searching easier, instead of clicking next page so many times!
However they're not being a dick about it - they let you download the whole bunch of tiles as PNG and as a .pat file so you could just then use your file manager to scan the PNGs.
What you don't get then is the quick view of the tiles in use but it shouldn't take long to knock up a quick script that will take a directory of tiles and give you a block of bgs to look at.
This is a great collection. I would maybe consider adding a custom color filter, and a custom text overlay w/ preview.. and maybe a sort by most popular/downloaded? Thanks again :)
Varying the contrast/brightness should be part of the process of evaluating a pattern for a website. Many users won't have properly calibrated monitors.
Windows 7 also has a screen calibration assistant, somewhere in control panel. IIRC it's not nearly as helpful, but if your screen's that bad you could probably improve it.
This is great. I needed a asphalt-like texture for a project and I made one using a site like this one, except with textures from the real world. http://www.mayang.com/textures/
90% of these give me a headache. I don't like any identically repeating pattern, it looks like it's moving to me. I think what happens is that when I glance at it, my brain sometimes matches up right and left eye with some offset.
I like the non-identical patterns, though. Introducing a little noise helps. Not sure why half the patterns are solid black rectangles either.
I'm converting the individual PNGs to GIMP pattern files, in case you don't want to download all of them in a single Photoshop pattern file: https://github.com/dbb/subtle-patterns-gimp
