Patterns posts

Patterns can make a website design more interesting and appealing. Often mildly skeuomorphic in nature, they bring an element of real-world texture to a site. The variation in tone that they create mimics the multi-tonal nature of real surfaces.

What’s more, patterns that tessellate are particularly suited to responsive design, as they can be repeated infinitely across...

What do you get when you cross an eccentric street artist, a traditional car manufacturer, and a trendy publication? You get extravagant, larger-than-life, mind-blowing art, of course.

Commissioned by Cadillac and Vanity Fair, renowned street artist Barry McGee produced a whopping 96 x 67 foot mural at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, New York. This bold addition to Cadillac’s “Art in the Streets” — only the second in what has become a series of yearly endeavors —...

We’re back with another great exclusive freebie for you.

This one is a Photoshop pattern file (.PAT) which contains 40 beautiful textures that you can apply to your designs.

A detailed step by step instruction is provided inside the file to help you use them. You can use these as textures for your websites or any background.

Thanks to Rayz Ong from LemonGraphic for creating this awesome freebie for WDD readers.

Redistribution is not allowed, so if you’d like to share this one...

As web designers, we spend most of our time praising web designs for their sleek interfaces and their awesome typography or even just the random design work, but truly, the unsung hero of design is the pattern. The pattern is popular, not just online, but offline too—we love a good pattern because it’s design in its purest form. Patterns allow us the ability to interpret good designs and rely on a little consistency.

When we talk patterns in web design, we often automatically think about backgrounds, but patterns are much more useful than that. Your favorite pattern set can be used as a wonderful texture or even a great border for your photographs. Whatever your usage for patterns, they are extremely important in good, solid...

In the wonderful world of web design, it has become normal practice to create designs that utilize background patterns that don’t draw a ton of attention, but have a bit of variation within them. Even if you are not creating website designs, it should be good practice to want to create patterns that are subtle, yet beautiful, and easy to use for any occasion.

Of course, it’s easy to find these types of patterns online so all you have to do is save them and use them, but wouldn’t you love to know how to make them from scratch—to add a little bit of personality to your web design? Well today we have put together 5 short tutorials to help you make five different types of subtle backgrounds.

These are Photoshop tutorials that are best for...

Navigation is one of the most important aspects of any website. Without good navigation, a site becomes useless to visitors. They can’t find the information they need, and then seek out competing sites instead. It’s vital that your sites be easy to navigate if you want to be a successful designer.

iBut there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to navigation. What works great on a news site might not work well for a personal site. Something that’s incredibly user-friendly on a blog might be frustrating on an e-commerce site.

Below are ten common types...

We’re excited to bring you another great free resource to our expanding collection of freebies here on WDD.

This one is called “Funkies Patterns” and includes 10 amazing psychedelic/retro pattern designs that you can use in Photoshop.

The patterns were designed exclusively for WDD by Kendra Gainez (also known as Kgainez).

She’s a talented 22 year old designer from Virginia who’s committed to helping individuals foster modern design techniques and infinite amounts of creativity.

Visit...