Windows 7 also has a screen calibration assistant, somewhere in control panel. IIRC it's not nearly as helpful, but if your screen's that bad you could probably improve it.
Varying the contrast/brightness should be part of the process of evaluating a pattern for a website. Many users won't have properly calibrated monitors.
This is really awesome. Just an hour ago my wife and I were scanning through an extensive collection of tile-able background images she stumbled onto (http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/). While I really liked a lot of the background images there, what I really love about the images in the OP is that they're friendly to content areas with text.
This has always been the hardest part for me, finding a subtle background pattern that gives a little more than a flat color, but that doesn't have too much contrast such that it draws the eye from the text. I'm glad to have found a resource specifically designed for this common need.
This is a great collection. I would maybe consider adding a custom color filter, and a custom text overlay w/ preview.. and maybe a sort by most popular/downloaded? Thanks again :)
This is great. I needed a asphalt-like texture for a project and I made one using a site like this one, except with textures from the real world. http://www.mayang.com/textures/
For our second site, we went with a different approach and designed it from scratch as a learning exercise. One of the experimental techniques we sweated over for hours and hours was using textures.
Not a bad idea, I'll talk it over with my co-founder about making the change.
We're trying to keep it as clean as possible, but I think you're right, we went overboard in exchange for burying an important data point behind another click.
Feature request: If there's a slider with the thumbnails of all the textures which can be browsed in single page, that would make the searching easier, instead of clicking next page so many times!
However they're not being a dick about it - they let you download the whole bunch of tiles as PNG and as a .pat file so you could just then use your file manager to scan the PNGs.
What you don't get then is the quick view of the tiles in use but it shouldn't take long to knock up a quick script that will take a directory of tiles and give you a block of bgs to look at.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadI just wish they weren't so... well, subtle. On my laptop, "Dark Leather" and "Triangles" both look exactly the same: a black rectangle.
I'm on a 1Ghz Dell laptop from 5 years ago. So the screen is... less than stellar.
I also have $280 to my name in total :P
I'll try it, but I don't think the screen is physically capable of generating enough luminosity to provide any fine-tuned amount of contrast... :)
Maybe the quick and dirty fix is the left half grey light, the right half grey dark?
For our first site, we used a template we got off of a template site, then modified it out of all recognition.
To be honest it's not great and we'll probably redo it before too long. But it was something we could hang a couple apps off of.
http://www.kymalabs.com
For our second site, we went with a different approach and designed it from scratch as a learning exercise. One of the experimental techniques we sweated over for hours and hours was using textures.
http://www.eggtweeter.com
We think it made a huge impact in the look of the site, but also drove us in new directions with the design we weren't planning on.
This site looks fantastic and something we'll definitely be looking at (maybe for an eventual redesign of our current site!)
We're trying to keep it as clean as possible, but I think you're right, we went overboard in exchange for burying an important data point behind another click.
Feature request: If there's a slider with the thumbnails of all the textures which can be browsed in single page, that would make the searching easier, instead of clicking next page so many times!
What you don't get then is the quick view of the tiles in use but it shouldn't take long to knock up a quick script that will take a directory of tiles and give you a block of bgs to look at.
I have seen the linear gradient close to the edge (creating the turned-under effect), but that seems overdone. Other ideas?