Do the recent redesign of Matt’s a.whole, relaunch of Dooce, and the always tight What Do I Know signal the return of the tiled background image? Thankfully, these are elegant and interesting — in a tasteful patterned material sort of way. Are backgrounds back?
If used in a subtle fashion, they do add a nice texture and element of depth.
all people are about is pattern recognition , really.
Don't forget http://www.whatdoiknow.org. I find them rather elegant if used to put the emphasis on the content and add a certain style. A background will always remain a "back"-ground and that's the way it should be. It's all about the visual impact. Abuse it and you get a horrid result.
Currently in fashion. These examples are done exceedingly well. Will it go out of style? I'm sure, but I think they're pretty cool as of now... I guess what I'm saying is "is it a trend?" Yes, "is that a bad thing, like [blink] tags?" No.
The Squidfinger tiles are beautiful.
I'm with Kristoff, did tiles ever leave, or have they just got noticably better?
They're gonna explode once K10k finishes up their pattern download/exchange portion of their website.
I think they're cute.
I think we need to bring back tacky tiled wallpaper in the home, too.
Check the "Textures" by Japanese designer Igarashi Susumu - circa 1998-1999. http://www.tcp-ip.or.jp/
The discrete background has been floating around for a while. Perhaps the question should be more accurately framed "Are webloggers, bored out of their minds by the mediocrity of their lives, going to adopt patterned backgrounds as the next stylistic bandwagon to jump on?"
And the answer is yes.
smoothj: heh. thats funny.
as far as im concerned, you can thank Surfstation for the return of backgrounds. Theirs arent so subtle but nice all the same, i think.
Smoothjhere here. I think something to note about this trend spotted with Dooce and a.whole is that their previous designs consisted (visually) of unique, asymmetrical layouts. Both just converted to CSS, and both ended up with the 'vertical rectangle' content box. Hence GIF patterns to occupy the large, empty borders.
Mostly, I find these backgrounds annoying. But then I spend all day designing Web apps, and bg's on those tend to be visually disturbing.
On a general design note: I wish we weren't constrained by all the boxes. The first box is my cube (woo!), then my monitor, then Windows desktop, browser window, content area (within the borders of the browser window), then the actual content box (like the one on this page that is actually a box within a box), then the box I am typing in.
I am so tired of 4 sides. I want to see (non-image) content in triangles, circles!
Tear down the walls! Okay, off to the usability lab with me.
as far as im concerned, you can thank Surfstation
Laurie De Martino has made a name for herself in the print world via the use of obscene amounts of tiled patterns these past few years.
Regardless, this is just too serious of a topic for me to fully construct an opinion on a Monday morn.
i think the tiles are great, i myself have started to become bored with the simplicity that was brought about by the trend towards "minimalism" or "htmlminimalism"
its too bad CSS/XHTML design is soooooooooo finicky, because the possibilities for non-square layouts are there, just hard to provide for uniform display across browsers with it.
Another pattern resource for you all:
http://www.podlob.com/extra/patterns/
Go patterns! Wooo!
All these patterns look like Casino carpet. Curious.
Get out of my head, Hopper. I knew some of these patterns reminded me of something, but I couldn't tell what. Too funny. It was either that or my father's tie collection.
See, this is why I come here, although my design days are (almost) behind me. I would like tiled backgrounds to come back, but I like them to add something to the site other than distract from the text. These examples are good, but I want to see where people could expand with the idea.
These are great!
Does anyone know of a good mac utility for making tiled images like this? Not to generate them I mean, but something that automatically tiles the image as you're working on it.
I still like this old website:
http://unstablemedia.com
nice wallpaper - excellent flash.
Well the big difference is that you never have the backgrounds behind the actual text, which is what really gave backgrounds a bad name last time around.
back with a vengeance
Great!