

Subtle Patterns: Free textures for your next web project - vitomd
http://subtlepatterns.com/

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mapleoin
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.

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hcho
All patterns over there look really psychedelic. Are 60s making a comeback?

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aculver
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.

~~~
Periodic
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.

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raphman
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?

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pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
raphman
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.

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masterzora
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.

~~~
kevinpet
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.

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bane
A _big_ struggle for our startup was learning how to design a good looking
site.

For our first site, we used a template we got off of a template site, then
modified it out of all recognition.

To be honest it's not great and we'll probably redo it before too long. But it
was _something_ we could hang a couple apps off of.

<http://www.kymalabs.com>

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.

<http://www.eggtweeter.com>

We think it made a huge impact in the look of the site, but also drove us in
new directions with the design we weren't planning on.

This site looks fantastic and something we'll definitely be looking at (maybe
for an eventual redesign of our current site!)

~~~
mhartl
N.B. The first FAQ (and its answer) should be on eggtweeter's home page.

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bane
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.

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Veera
Simply great.

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!

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craze3
You're forgetting that the webmaster wants fresh ads to be loaded.. :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

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PStamatiou
This is great! Like tileabl.es and some other website I'm forgetting at the
moment.

Regarding design for your next proj/startup: I wrote this "crash course" post
a while ago: <http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course>

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sgdesign
That's a great site! Also, if you're looking for simpler pixel patterns, you
can use something I built a while back:

<http://www.patternify.com/>

~~~
schrototo
That's pretty neat. The only thing that's missing IMO is an option to preview
the pattern as the background of the page.

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haroldp
Cool. Now hook me up with a site that does this for those cicada patterns
previously featured on HN:

[http://designfestival.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-
ma...](http://designfestival.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-matters-to-
web-designers/)

~~~
haroldp
Hah, went to reread that page and the first thing it mentions now is just such
a project: <http://designfestival.com/cicada/>

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natesm
A nice addition would be the proper background color for before it loads.

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mrtron
Ya, would just require a default settings per texture.

Maybe the quick and dirty fix is the left half grey light, the right half grey
dark?

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palish
These are actually fantastic ZBrush patterns, as well.

I just wish they weren't so... well, subtle. On my laptop, "Dark Leather" and
"Triangles" both look exactly the same: a black rectangle.

~~~
wavephorm
You probably have your contrast up too high. Try calibrating your monitor,
MacOS includes a utility.

~~~
palish
Haw. I wish I had a Mac.

I'm on a 1Ghz Dell laptop from 5 years ago. So the screen is... less than
stellar.

I also have $280 to my name in total :P

~~~
wlesieutre
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.

~~~
palish
Heh. Thanks.

I'll try it, but I don't think the screen is physically capable of generating
enough luminosity to provide any fine-tuned amount of contrast... :)

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kefs
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 :)

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richardw
Donated. If this site saved you some time, maybe think about giving him
something for it.

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p_monk
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/>

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JoshTriplett
Very awesome. I like how the preview feature doesn't change the offset of the
texture in the box, but just lets it appear outside that box.

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kevinpet
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.

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Raphael
"Triangles" should be called "Parallelograms".

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bluppy2
Another nice collection of free tileable patterns: <http://tileabl.es/>

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DanBC
I love this! I really like the fact that (as others have mentioned) they are
text friendly. I've added one to my custom CSS for HN.

(and a teeny-tiny comment if they're reading this: possessive its has no
apostrophe. (See description for Stucco.))

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baran
When using multiple textures on a page, how can you effectively transition
from one to another?

I have seen the linear gradient close to the edge (creating the turned-under
effect), but that seems overdone. Other ideas?

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empire29
Very nice job -- i particularly like the "organic" patterns (like black linen)

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munaf
Very cool! Great to see a pattern site that's actually clean and usable.

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fuzionmonkey
Awesome, this is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

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Nat0
Nice site! I was just working on a pack of background textures like this that
I was going to give away. I will have to submit them to the site.

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vnuk
Site seems to crash a lot, probably isn't built for being on HN front page :)

Otherwise, kudos - some beautiful textures. Thank you

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lukedupont
It is so refreshing to see a well designed pattern download site. A infinite
scroll would be a nice touch!! Fantastic job with this.

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snorkel
Did I fall into a rip in the universe where web developers are once again in
love with background textures?

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vitomd
I am not affiliated with the site, just shared the link beacause is awesome
and I used it in some projects.

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alttag
I was looking for exactly this last week.

Do you have an easy way to flag or bookmark patterns?

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krumjahn
Super awesome. Is the green pattern you've used for the buttons available too?
Thanks alot!

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wingerlang
Awesome, I am always looking for excatly this every time i try to make a
webpage.

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tortilla
Love this site, I've been using these in last couple of projects.

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mailanay
Thanks ! Extremely useful for non-designer programmer like me !

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PatHyatt
Awesome patterns, very subtle but bring a lot to the page.

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einai
Nice site with great textures! Thank you for sharing.

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jeffehobbs
These are great! Very useful and well-organized.

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deniz
This is great. The preview feature is clever.

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anakin
Awesome! Love it. Thank you man :-)

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incongruity
Thank you – this'll come in handy!

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Duckpaddle2
Very Nice!

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dbbo
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>

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dbbo
Tile one, add a radial gradient, and you've got a killer desktop
background/wallpaper.

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funkah
This is awesome! These patterns are really nice. Good work.

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bigfoot
The 90ies called, they want their tiled backgrounds back.

