7 Examples of Texture In Web Design

While the recent trend towards “flat” design emphasizes solid color blocks and clean lines, the ability to use texture effectively is still a necessary and powerful tool in the designer’s toolbox. Your use of texture can range from subtle to bold, from colorful to monochromatic, from a slight accent to a focal element  – there are virtually endless ways to use texture creatively in your designs. Texture can be used to add personality to your designs, produce a more immersive environment, and refine the visual experience.

Here are some examples of texture use to give you inspiration:

Jib

texture01Jib is a design and advertising agency based out of Toronto. Their homepage uses a light wood grain texture to give the site a slight retro feel. This little bit of texture is subtle, but it completely transforms the feel of the site, giving the visitor the impression of age and authority.

You’ll notice that the wood grain spreads across the entire background. While it can be risky using the same texture across an entire page, in this case it works well with the designer’s color choices. It should go without saying, but always pay attention to how your texture choices interact with other elements of your design.

Italiokitchen

texture02Here’s another example of wood grain, but used as an accent instead rather than as a background texture for the entire page. The contrast of these two examples shows how important it is to consider context when deciding how you’re going to apply texture to your design. You can make nearly any textural element work, provided you keep in mind context.

Marc Thomas

texture03Texture doesn’t have to be something subtle you use to subtly alter the look and feel of your site – it can be the focal point of your design. This splash page is pretty much just a name, background, and call to action button, but the texture is what makes it work.

Here the design is enhanced by the map in the background that functions as a textural backdrop, and the little dots that give the site an “old-school” movie projector feel.

Lab Fiftyfive

texture04This example shows how you can use abstract background elements to accent a simple design. The hint of texture in the background gives this simple business card style layout a much needed element of depth.

This site would also be a great illustration of the power of typography, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another time.

Mode 87

texture05The old “photo as a background” technique is often overused, but there are certainly times when it works well. Here, the background photo is blurred, turning it into a more abstract background than if it were clearly defined. The background blurring also drives focus to the foreground element, which also gives the viewer the impression that they’re at a concert, but completely focused on their phone.

While background images aren’t strictly considered “textures”, a background image to one designer might be applied like a textural element to another. Don’t be afraid to try things that are out of the box.

Arkleus

texture06The use of noise here transforms just another background photo into a something else entirely. Note how the combination of noise texture and dark colors here gives the site a mysterious feel – perfect for a launch site.

I Shot Him

texture07What about incorporating real life texture into your designs? Here’s a great reminder that texture isn’t a design “technique” – it’s a very real part of how we interact with our visual world. We’re surrounded by texture everywhere we look – but a great designer can manipulate that texture to create works of beauty, whether in the real or digital world.

It’s easy to get stuck in a design rut where you constantly go back to design elements that have worked for you in the past, but an important part of growing as a designer is to expand your comfort zone and continuously try new things. Hopefully these examples gave you a few new ideas of how you can incorporate texture into your own designs.

This guest article was written by Simon. He is currently working for Jangomail a cool provider.

Getting WordPress on an Amazon EC2 at No Cost(Using OpenShift)

Having a website on WordPress platform requires us to have a web server to host our WordPress installation, though there are plenty of free and cheap offerings for WordPress web hosting, but they aren’t worth the trouble, and getting a good plan like dedicated server hosting means spending huge bucks.

One of the top notch web hosting service provided is Amazon EC2, having a website there gives us plenty of advantages like scalability(means we can scale up/down dynamically with no downtime), no server maintenance(as they will do it), easy upgrades of softwares(like php, MySQL) and plenty more. However, Amazon EC2 is not a “free web hosting” provider(although there is a Free Tier, but it is limited) but still we can get our website up there for no cost using OpenShift.

Openshift is a PaaS offering, which is meant for users and developers to share code/applications with community. That is, it is not exactly a web host, but you can host a WordPress installation in it as well. It also means that the PaaS provider will take care of all the security updates(and all that we get with regular Amazon EC2).

I am not going in details of how you can set up a WordPress installation on an OpenShift account since Amith Shah has already done this, check the blog post at http://log.amitshah.net/2011/12/blog-moved-to-wordpress-on-openshift/.

4 New WordPress Plugins

I have created four new WordPress Plugins(after jFlow Plus) in past two months. These plugins provide various amazing functionalities for WordPress Blogs and Websites, I know I should have posted about them here(In Blog) long ago only, but still, its never too late, they are:

Archives: This plugin creates an Archives Page for your WordPress site, the Archives Page lists Tag Cloud, Latest Posts, Categories and Monthly Archives. You can specify the number of latest posts to be displayed from the settings page of this plugin in the Dashboard.

Enhance Admin Bar: This Plugin adds numerous useful options for WordPress Admin Bar, options like Bit.ly Shortlink, Custom Nav Menu in Admin Bar, Admin Bar on bottom and a lot more, all the options can be set in the settings menu of this plugin.

Add Font Family Dropdown to Visual Editor: This is a fairly basic plugin and adds a Font family dropdown for selecting fonts.

Custom Login Redirect: Custom Login Redirect adds a drop down to the login form which lets you to redirect to custom locations after logging in. There are 16 default options already present in the drop down and you can add your own custom URls as well.

Vivid Photo Free Photography Template Now Available

So, I have just completed my first photography website template, the template’s name is “Vivid Photo”. This one is also single page uses extensive jQuery and HTML5 and a lot more modern functionalities. You can download it from its release page at https://priteshgupta.com/templates/vivid-photo/.

You are free to use it for your personal as well as commercial projects as it is released under New BSD License. If you have any issues related to it, you can contact me via the contact form at https://priteshgupta.com/contact/.

Here is a small preview of the template, but head over and see the Live Preview to have a look at its functionalities, go to the Release Page for full details.
Vivid Photo
Download it from here.

Immaculate Portfolio Template v1.0 Now Available

I have made another free template “Immaculate”. This one is a single page website template, with smooth scrolling, has 6 skins included in it, working ajax contact form, useful shortcodes and a lot more. This one also uses HTML5 and CSS3 and is fast loading while being cross browser compatible. You should definitely head over to its release page at https://priteshgupta.com/templates/immaculate/.

You are free(And recommended ;-)) to share and use it. You are free to use it for your personal as well as commercial projects as it is released under New BSD License. If you have any issues related to it, you can contact me via the contact form at https://priteshgupta.com/contact/.

Here is a small preview of one of the skin of the template, go to the Release Page for full details.
Immaculate
You can see the live preview here and download it from here.

jFlow Plus: Awesome WordPress Slider Plugin

jFlow Plus is a very cool jQuery slider been since a while, it is based on jFlow by ktan, though implementing these kinds of jQuery plugins isn’t very difficult, but implementing on WordPress at times get messy, especially if the user frequently changes/customizes their WordPress themes. So to overcome these, I made a WordPress Plugin for easy implementation of jFlow Plus, it does not modify the theme or any other gallery and works separately and is very easy to implement, the width and height of the slider can be changed from the settings menu in the WordPress Dashboard along with autoplay option and time to transition one slide. You can head over to its Release Page or go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jflow-plus/ for downloading it.

Dummy Content for Websites

When making or developing websites, web designers often need sample content and creating sample content again and again is a chore. Thankfully there are couple of places where we can get dummy content for our websites, we just need to copy and paste them and showcase it to clients and some tools too which create dummy contents in a click for your CMS.

<html>ipsum


html ipsum
Here you can get preformatted sample HTML content, it has various formats like ul, ol, table, form etc. I think this website is really handy while making websites, especially because of the dummy content’s multiple formats, you should head over and check it out definitely.

For WordPress

Lorem Ipsum Test Post Pack
While there are many dummy content import files for WordPress, but there is no use for a dozen of them if one does the job fine, you can head over to WordPress – Lorem Ipsum Test Post Pack and check it out. The Test Post Pack has formatted text for 30 posts, test pages, categories, sub categories, etc. Alternatively, you can also try out WP Dummy Content plugin.

Dummy Content Generators

Fillerati – Faux Latin is a Dead Language


Fillerati - Faux Latin is a Dead Language
I you are bored of using Lorem Ipsum in your websites then you can try this website, the website is made using HTML5. Rather than Lorem Ipsum text, this website gives extracts from English literature.

Dummy Text Generator, Lorem ipsum for webdesigners


Dummy Text Generator, Lorem ipsum for webdesigners
This website helps you create dummy content in various formats and layouts.

Dynamic Dummy Image Generator – DummyImage.com


Dynamic Dummy Image Generator - DummyImage.com
This website creates images of custom dimensions and allows you to chose between background and foreground colors, you can even add dummy text, use multiples formats(.jpg, .png, etc) and do a lot more. For me it is a really nice tool.

Placehold.it – Quick and simple image placeholders


Placehold.it - Quick and simple image placeholders
Something like DummyImage.com only.

Elegant Press Website Template Version 1.0 Now Available

So I have finally completed my website template “Elegant Press”, it has been made using HTML5 and CSS3, it is cross (modern)browser compatible, has web fonts, jQuery plugins, etc. Overall, its awesome and totally free! Its licensed under New BSD License, read more about it here, you should surely give it a try. You can see its release page at https://priteshgupta.com/templates/elegant-press/, you can download it for free from there.

Feel free to share and use it. You are free to use it for your personal as well as commercial projects as it is released under New BSD License. If you have any issues related to it, you can contact me via the contact form at https://priteshgupta.com/contact/. Please note this theme is not made for older browsers and looks funny on them, but who cares?

Here is a small preview, go to the release page for full details.
Elegant Press
You can see the live preview here and download it from here.

Design Kindle: Awesome Website for Free Web Design Files

Design Kindle is a community driven web design resources website which offers premium quality web design files like graphics, vectors, icons, textures, etc for absolutely free with no required membership. Isn’t this awesome? Thats not all, all the stuff here is royalty free and we are free to use them in our personal and commercial projects, without the necessity of linking back to them.You can visit the website at http://www.designkindle.com/. I personally liked their free graphics collections a lot, they are totally amazing and very useful in creating websites.

If you know any other website like this, feel free to share.

Best Websites for Stock Free Photos

We quite often need to use images for our websites or blogs and for getting legit images we always end up buying them, and spend a lot of $. But there are many websites on Internet which offer free Royalty Free Photos. I sharing some of the best websites which offer Free Stock Photos. Please drop by if you know any other too.

stock.xchng


stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site

Getty Images


Royalty Free Images   Photos  Unlimited Use   Getty Images

FreeDigitalPhotos.net


Free Photos - Free Images - Royalty Free Photos - Free Stock Photos - FreeDigitalPhotos.net

morgueFile


morgueFile free photos for creatives by creatives

Corbis Images


Corbis Images – Premium Quality Stock Photography and Illustrations

everystockphoto


everystockphoto - searching free photos

Public Domain Pictures


Public Domain Pictures - Free Stock Photos

Stockvault.net


Stockvault.net - Free Stock Photos and Free Images

Jupiterimages


Stockvault.net - Free Stock Photos and Free Images

freerangestock.com


Free Stock Photos at freerangestock.com - Totally Free Stock Photography and Textures

Stock Images on deviantART


Stock Images on deviantART

Flickr


Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing

Dreamstime’s Free Stock Images and Photos


Dreamstime - Download Free Stock Images and Photos

Fotolia’s Free Stock Images and Photos


Fotolia's Free Stock Images and Photos

iStockphoto’s Free Stock Images and Photos


iStockphoto's Free Collection

Creative Commons Search


Creative Commons Search