Web design is an art full of creativity. To attract more visitors, designers are trying to add textures to spice up their websites. These textures are always inspired from nature and our daily life, including paper, grass, pebble, wood, paint, leather, sand and much more. When used properly, textures definitely can give your website a visual appealing.
Some designers use textures as the background with distinct layer or color gradient, while others use them for highlighting the most important parts of the webpage like the header, footer, sidebar, content area or even button. Whatever purposes they hold, using textures in website design can bring us a lot of benefits.
Create reality
Many texture designs come from real objects like the water or clay. They present visitors a touch of reality. When visitors come to your website and the first element they saw is what they know or familiar with. This may be impressive and evoke warmhearted emotions. Like the textured website of Pixle, it sells an application that can turn your iPad or iPhone into a chalkboard. This site uses an old school blackboard as the main texture bearing the navigation and price information written with chalk. I am sure this chalkboard texture adds some realism to the website design and finds a bridge between website owners and customers.
Highlight important elements
We usually emphasize the vital element with color contrast. However, textures are becoming a new trend to achieve this. A soft and subtle texture with a clever layout and white spaces will help you highlight your content or heading; and a creative small texture can also guide the user’s eye directly to the desired navigation, icon or call to action. For example, you can draw attention in two common ways: a textured button against a clean background and a clean button against a textured background. On the other hand, texture is also a great way to separate key elements. Take the website of Celebration Invitations as an example; it takes full advantage of the textures in different colors to highlight the header, the logo as well as the buttons. The patterned background also helps to make intended element pop up in a clever way.
Give a unique look
To make your website looks unique in a creative way always helps you win a competitive edge over others. And textures can give you a big hand in many ways. For instance, some designers give their website a special look with some grunge textures like the yellowed paper or the painted bricks. Take a look at the following example, the designer of Art Flavors created a textured design with a mixture of denim, paper and wood. This fantastic textured website gives a unique look and really shows its artistic flavor.
Add an interesting touch
It is a good idea to captivate web visitors for long periods of time with some interesting element, and texture design can do it for you. Just choose some textures that create interest and engage your viewers in the right atmosphere. Like the Mogie’s Pub, it uses brick texture as the background and makes visitors feel like that they are almost in the pub. This interesting technique helps to compel the viewers to go through all the pages.
Need More Web Texture Inspiration?
Using texture is a good way to add depth, reality, uniqueness and attraction to a web design. Just make sure that the textures you use are matching with the target audience and the background color with good legibility. To give you more inspiration, I’ve gathered a variety of texture applications in website design. Hope this showcase will inspire you for your next project.
1. La botana grill
2. Aussie bbq legends
3. Cake sweet cake
4. Ibe fed
5. Dilly deli
6. Sheldon farm baskets
7. Emily Whitesmith
8. Quintadabelavista.com
9. Sycfuk
10. Spreadt
11. Cotton seed oiltour
12. Pigeon and pigeonette
13. Marchand detrucs
14. Md craft beer festival
15. Wandering goat
16. Ywam Ozarks
17. Sand and starfish
18. Christ kaufman
19. Head lamp creative
20. Go bloom health
21. 1love
22. Adventure time
23. Catcher’s performance summary
24. apbaxter
25. Bahur 78
What’s Your Thought?
As you can see from the above examples, textured websites come in many forms from heavily texture background to just minimal textured elements. Whatever texture design is, it may add so much visual appeal to a website when used cleverly. However, please remember to choose textures that are logical for your design and help to build identity. Hope you enjoy this post, and if you know of any others, please feel free to drop a comment and let me know.
