Subtle Patterns: Free textures for your next web project

There is a huge community around website colors, palettes and patterns over at <a href="http://colourlovers.com" rel="nofollow">http://colourlovers.com</a> . 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 (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/</a>). 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.

The license is pretty confusing: <i>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.</i><p>Am I required to adhere to the CC-BY license or does the second part indeed cancel the BY requirement?

A <i>big</i> struggle for our startup was learning how to design a good looking site.<p>For our first site, we used a template we got off of a template site, then modified it out of all recognition.<p>To be honest it's not great and we'll probably redo it before too long. But it was <i>something</i> we could hang a couple apps off of.<p><a href="http://www.kymalabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.kymalabs.com</a><p>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.<p><a href="http://www.eggtweeter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.eggtweeter.com</a><p>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.<p>This site looks fantastic and something we'll definitely be looking at (maybe for an eventual redesign of our current site!)

Simply great.<p>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 <i>next page</i> so many times!

This is great! Like tileabl.es and some other website I'm forgetting at the moment.<p>Regarding design for your next proj/startup: I wrote this "crash course" post a while ago: <a href="http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course" rel="nofollow">http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course</a>

That's a great site! Also, if you're looking for simpler pixel patterns, you can use something I built a while back:<p><a href="http://www.patternify.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.patternify.com/</a>

Cool. Now hook me up with a site that does this for those cicada patterns previously featured on HN:<p><a href="http://designfestival.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-matters-to-web-designers/" rel="nofollow">http://designfestival.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-ma...</a>

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

These are actually fantastic ZBrush patterns, as well.<p>I just wish they weren't so... well, subtle. On my laptop, "Dark Leather" and "Triangles" both look exactly the same: a black rectangle.

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 :)

Donated. If this site saved you some time, maybe think about giving him something for 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. <a href="http://www.mayang.com/textures/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mayang.com/textures/</a>

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.

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.<p>I like the non-identical patterns, though. Introducing a little noise helps. Not sure why half the patterns are solid black rectangles either.

"Triangles" should be called "Parallelograms".

Another nice collection of free tileable patterns: <a href="http://tileabl.es/" rel="nofollow">http://tileabl.es/</a>

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

When using multiple textures on a page, how can you effectively transition from one to another?<p>I have seen the linear gradient close to the edge (creating the turned-under effect), but that seems overdone. Other ideas?

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

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

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

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.

Site seems to crash a lot, probably isn't built for being on HN front page :)<p>Otherwise, kudos - some beautiful textures. Thank you

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

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

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

I was looking for exactly this last week.<p>Do you have an easy way to flag or bookmark patterns?

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

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

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

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

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

Nice site with great textures! Thank you for sharing.

These are great! Very useful and well-organized.

This is great. The preview feature is clever.

Awesome! Love it. Thank you man :-)

Thank you – this'll come in handy!

Very Nice!

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: <a href="https://github.com/dbb/subtle-patterns-gimp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dbb/subtle-patterns-gimp</a>

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

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

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