It all depends on the personality you want to communicate and the real-world associations you want to make for visitors.įor example, this quirky spin-off site for a Vancouver-based digital agency capitalizes on the power of texture perfectly. A bakery texture might add a sprinkle of, well, sprinkles to their texture. A tech company can opt for a geometric abstract texture. For example, an outdoors company could implement a grass, night sky, or snowy texture. Web textures are great at doing this - they can make viewers feel positive emotions and associate them with your brand. I’m talking about visual elements that most users don’t consciously register but affect their browsing experience nonetheless. Great design accounts not just for what users see, but also for what they don’t see. Web textures can serve two primary functions on your site: conjuring feelings and drawing attention.

You’ve seen gradients like this all over, since they’re a great way to engage visually with minimal distraction.Īs with just about any other design element, effective web textures go beyond making a page look interesting. I know I’ve talked a lot about textures without examples, so let’s look at some now.įirst, here’s an abstract, subtle web texture. On the other end, loud textures immediately bring attention to that region of the page and firmly establish the personality of a website. On one end, subtle textures are hardly visible, but still present enough to lend a sense of personality and warmth. Prominence refers to how much a texture stands out against its fellow elements. This is similar to the concept of skeuomorphism - the more realistic a texture appears, the more we associate it with our real-life experiences, which makes the page more immersive. This can range from abstract designs, like a color gradient or geometric pattern, to real-world tangibles like grass, carpet, or linen. Realism refers to how closely a texture resembles a real-world texture. It’s useful to classify web textures in terms of two factors: realism and prominence. Web textures come in many varieties to evoke a range of feelings and experiences.

Web textures try to replicate that life-like feeling in the digital world. Think of lying in the grass on a summer afternoon, or the tiny craters on a piece of construction paper. This all has an interesting effect on our brains - it evokes emotions that we associate with the real world. By presenting a 3D backdrop for your page elements, they induce something of a haptic sensation through the visual medium of our computer screens. Web textures are a unique web design method because they aim to replicate one of our physical sensations, touch with, another, sight. Web textures serve to enhance the look and feel of a website by giving web pages personality and depth. In web design, a web texture is a visual element, typically a background image, that resembles a three-dimensional, tactile surface.

Web wallpaper texture