Using textures to enhance your design

A problem that I often see in design, and specifically website design, is the lack of life that is brought into the design. While we can all create a lot of very excellent effects using a variety of plug-ins and built in effects from Photoshop etc, you just cant match the quality of importing textures from the real world into your work.

You see its the imperfections found in fabrics, paints, wood and stone to name a few, that set off a design giving it a realistic atmosphere.

While it may be tempting to use a lot of elements to try and bring your website to life it can often end up overloaded, distracting and hard to use. Take a look at some of the websites in our design inspiration gallery and other css galleries around the Internet and you will see that most of the top design all use a variety of texture styles. The best you can see actually seem to lift the content off the page and create depth in their design.

So where do you use textures in your website design?
You want to keep it simple and stick to backgrounds, menu bars, footers and sidebars. If you want to use textures in your content area just be careful and make sure that your text is still 100% readable and not a strain to the eyes.

From the examples you can see below, the best way to use quality textures is to keep them simple and not distract your users from the content they are actually using your website for.

http://www.imagineplus.in