Show HN: Pick a better background pattern for your website

This is a little bookmarklet I built that lets you preview the great patterns from <a href="http://subtlepatterns.com" rel="nofollow">http://subtlepatterns.com</a> directly on your website.<p>Feedback and comments welcome :)

SubtlePatterns has been a great resource for me -- especially when I'm trying to turn something around really quick -- and this bookmarklet makes the process of selecting a good background MUCH faster. Thanks so much!

I applaud the work and appreciate what you and the Subtlepatterns guys are doing. Thank you!<p>I do have a plea to users of some of these backgrounds. Perhaps I am a tinge obsessive compulsive, but the backgrounds that include uneven specks always make me think I have dust on my monitor that I need to wipe off. So when making a selection, might I ask you to choose a regular pattern rather than ones that are intended to look like spotty paper fiber? That is, of course, unless you are a paper products company. :)

This is really useful, thank you!<p>I built this tool to test out Adobe webfonts. I'd like to convert it into a bookmarklet like you did here. Thanks for the inspiration!<p><a href="http://harrisnovick.com/cygni" rel="nofollow">http://harrisnovick.com/cygni</a> (move mouse to left browser edge for menu).

Looks like a pretty good tool. It's always a lot of effort to try out lots of different backgrounds, going through downloading the .zip archives and putting them into the CSS. This will definitely encourage me to actually experiment!

Just FYI, the "try it now" feature jumps you to the top of the page every time you click on the next/previous buttons. (You might not be handling the click event correctly.) Otherwise, I like it!

Nice work Brad, This is really cool. Now I want to hook something like this up to an A/B testing framework and see if I can improve site metrics simply by swapping out the background. Adding some basic image manipulation (hue, saturation, blur, etc) on top of the patterns would be nice to, as I imagine that how most people use that resource.

I found it less usable than Subtle Patterns - reason is to switch to new background, I have to 'click', where as on Subtle Patterns I can scroll and see more backgrounds (given that it shows me only the rectangle of background instead of full site background).<p>If there is a way you can make it keyboard friendly, it would be great.

Really handy tool, thanks! I second the suggestion of allowing the background to be applied to another element.

Looks useful, but unfortunately doesn't work on sites that require https.

Great stuff, I love SubtlePatterns and use it quite often but usually it takes some time to try several patterns and find the right one, so this bookmarklet surely will come in handy :)

This is great! Any chance of a random button to join next/previous?

You rock. This is crazy useful for trying out styles on stuff i'm building. I'd echo one of the suggestions here, there needs to be a way to apply to non-body elements.

I've been using subtlepatterns for a while now and have to say that you guys rock. Thank you for creating something awesome for the internet.

I'm going to try using this next time I find a web site that I can't read because the background and foreground mix together.

Sick! Picking SubtlePattern backgrounds has always been a tedious process, will be using this across all my stuff.

Can't find a close button to hide the dialog box after clicking the bookmarked subblepatterns button

Really neat Bookmark. Commenting on this as a way of keeping my eye on it for later tonight.

That's pretty sweet. Being able to give it a css selector though, now that would rock!

This is great, thanks for making it! Definitely will save me time.

Love it! The perfect combination of simple and helpful.

You'll make lot of lives easier :)

So useful! Thank you so much.

subtlepatterns.com doesn't seem to be loading the css?

This is perfect.

this is awesome

Swag.

having recently created a blog i was looking to test various backgrounds. i'll play around with it, cheers