Backgrounds and Textures

This lists, categorically, backgrounds and textures collections that I use or consider to be of some quality. When possible, I prefer listing collections where the backgrounds are made by the authors of the websites, rather than random, large, and anonymous collections of backgrounds that probably belong to someone else.

Remember, the people who go through the trouble of making backgrounds and then, God knows why, giving them away for free, deserve a little credit. So make sure, before you forget, to always link back to their pages whenever you use one of their backgrounds. I've personally made a sources page as a reminder to myself. It's an easy way to keep tabs on where you got everything from, should you ever want to go back and get some more. Also NEVER, NEVER make a background collection of your own using a background made by someone else. They can make their own archive of their work, thank you very much.

To use a background, save the image from the artist's webpage into YOUR OWN homepage directory, so that you can use it without draining on the artist's webserver.

Finally, if you're shopping for backgrounds, you might like some tips on Color and Images, which I have links to on my good html page. One site even has instructions for making seamless backgrounds.


Consciously Pretty

Windy's Design Studio
I can only stand to have a link to ONE page where the backgrounds are especially cute or "feminine" or sweet, and this is the one. It's less disgustingly sugary than most, and by golly, Windy actually does make an effort to create high quality and palatable images.

Basic

Just 10 basics ought to do.

  1. Free Images has a surprisingly well-chosen archive of buttons, bars, and other images, which you can even change the colors for.
  2. Ender-Design's Realm Graphics has the old standards which you see in many anonymous collections, and which are only a little more creative than the boring Netscape backgrounds. However, the clear organization on this site makes it worth the link.
  3. I list The Pub Man's spare but nice collection of home-made backgrounds to remind you not to overlook the small stuff while trying to sift through all the garbage you find on the net, and to guilt you once again into realizing the trouble these nice-hearted folks go through, so that you'll bloody give them a link like they deserve.
  4. Pam Bytes has a refined, clean style. Pam Bytes logo
  5. The Enchantress has a large collection of varied border sets and backgrounds, both feminine and otherwise, plus helpful graphics tips. Enchantress logo
  6. Background City is where I got my cool caves texture.
  7. The peacock texture is among the notable images available at Oscar's Backgrounds.
  8. Though quite strikingly pretty, Heidi's Hyper Backgrounds are, as the author says, less than subtle. Heidi logo
  9. Julianne's Textures are variations of patterns in many colors.
  10. Media Links has an archive wherein the individual creators of the graphics are identified!

Artistic

The logos are just for me to remember and use when I put their backgrounds on whatever page within my site. Yes, I am being lazy about aligning them.

Animations

Like the Pretty category, I can only stand to list ONE page with animations on it, because I think that animations are way over-used on the web anyway. Luree's Animations are cute, and her backgrounds are quite out-of-the-ordinary.

3D

Actually, you know, any kind of textured background is a little bit 3D, if it gives you the impression of rough paper, bumpy rocks, carved designs, etc. I will try to place very 3D collections here.

High Contrast

Please note--"high contrast" usually means it's difficult to read text on top of it. Believe it or not, there ARE people (in fact, virtually everybody) whose computer monitors show colors quite differently from yours, or have strange brightness and contrast levels. This could seriously affect the way your page looks and reads.

However, since a lot of really cool images and backgrounds are too beautiful to resist, I will list these collections anyway and just advise you to use the HTML trick of putting your text within a table, with or without a border, and then defining an easily readable background color for each table cell; Infinite Fish has made a table background color example of this trick. Infinite Fish

  1. McTurner's textures are so good they very much tempted me into sacrificing readability for beauty on my webpages.
  2. Flux's Texture Land! contains all that oddball and semi-grotesque stuff for you wild ones out there.
  3. Brain Soup's archive is highly quirky, but perhaps you'd like to see Parabola's version of the example page. Brain Soup logo
  4. Being Seen Graphics has backgrounds, as well as buttons and balls.
  5. Michael Johnson's Midnight Hour links to his many backgrounds, and his helpful HTML resources.
  6. Jay's Original Backgrounds are very colorful and high-contrast.

This background was made by me.

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© Huong Nguyen 1998