At various points in the web’s history, it’s been seen as fashionable to see just how much of a web design you can create with just HTML and CSS — including images in the design only where absolutely needed, such as icons. It’s a great exercise for honing your skills: how far can I go with just code? But in the real world, some of the most gorgeous sites are created with multiple layers of textures, requiring the inclusion of many images by necessity.
Here are 30 web designs that make heavy use of textures, whether they’re trendy noise textures, now old-fashioned grunge textures or something else entirely. One thing they all have in common? They look better than half of those fast-loading but image-free designs.
The Seen
Carlos
Solid Giant
Vector Stories
Cognition
All Star Lanes
Six11Ink
Carbonica
Jeroen Homan
SimpleBits
Hugs for Monsters
AdFlavor
The Brown Corporation
Bern Unlimited
Edgepoint Church
Schepps Design
Sundance Institute
Infinitum
e-One
I Am Todd
Salt of the Earth
Jeff Sarmiento
David Hellmann
Jambalaya
Reklama Audio
MapBox
Toby Powell
MacTarnahan’s Amber Ale
Rockatee Design
It’s worth noting that with the advent of CSS3, tools such as Patternify have started springing up that make it possible to include PNG patterns in your CSS code as Base 64 text. It’s impractical to try and cover the full range of textures and implementations this way, but it’s perhaps the coolest, most performance-conscious way of handling images in CSS since sprites.
What are some of your own favorite textured web designs? Let us know about them in the comments!
Want to submit some cool web designs? Enter a web design contest online.
Daniel Thornton
Latest posts by Daniel Thornton (see all)
- 30 Bold Red Web Designs – April 5, 2012
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- 30 Brilliantly Textured Web Designs for Your Inspiration – September 7, 2011
awesome examples for learn about professional designs. thanks for sharing
Those are incredible, bookmarked to come back for some inspiration when I try to create a website with background textures.
Great post. Adding textures (even subtle) to Website Design is a brilliant way to enhance any website. It add’s another layer of creativity.
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Wow! Some fantastic design here. Some are so unique and beautiful! I hope to be able to create something awesome like this one day.