Grunge Style In Web Design

About The Author

Sven is the co-founder and former CEO of Smashing Magazine. He writes at his Conterest Blog where he focuses on blogs, content strategy, writing and publishing … More about Sven ↬

Email Newsletter

Weekly tips on front-end & UX.
Trusted by 200,000+ folks.

Most design trends come unexpectedly, evolve over time, become pointless and finally disappear from the design landscape. This holds particularly for web design, which is — just as every other creative field — prone for over-hyping and over-usage of trends. Being used excessively (sometimes properly, but mostly without any reasonable purpose), trends lose their ability to communicate information, express something unique or innovative and consequently lose their visual appeal.

Most design trends come unexpectedly, evolve over time, become pointless and finally disappear from the design landscape. This holds particularly for web design, which is — just as every other creative field — prone for over-hyping and over-usage of trends. Being used excessively (sometimes properly, but mostly without any reasonable purpose), trends lose their ability to communicate information, express something unique or innovative and consequently lose their visual appeal.

Web 2.0 style is an excellent example for this evolution in design. In 2007 we’ve observed a clear example of design abuse, as glossy buttons, colorful reflections, 3D-effects, rounded corners and xx-large font sizes could be found almost everywhere (and we’ve presented some examples a year ago). However, currently we’ve been observing a new step in this evolution. Web 2.0 elements start to disappear; they become more subtle, more user-centric, more content-oriented and less loud.

What is the Grunge style?

As Web 2.0 style passes way, it’s time for something new. Few weeks ago we’ve written about the hand-drawing style in modern web-design. And as Web 2.0 style is all about glossy and shiny look, another option would be something rather crude, radical and provoking. Such as the grunge style — dirty look with irregular, nasty, sometimes even ugly and crooked visual elements. Will it establish itself as a trend? Probably not. However, it may be used once some creative and unconventional design approach is needed.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

Below we’ve collected everything you would ever need for a perfect design in a grunge style — design examples, free fonts, icons, textures, brushes and even few tutorials.

Examples of Grunge Style

Grunge doesn’t necessarily stand for dirty. Grunge designs may have subtle dirty elements, providing the content with the dominant position it deserves. Let’s take a look at some examples how it might look like. All screenshots are linked and lead to the sites from which they have been taken.

Texture Screenshot
Web 2.0 meets Grunge.

Texture Screenshot
Notice the clear, rigid structure of the site blocks, supported by the grunge style.

Texture Screenshot
Visually appealing design with grunge elements.

Texture Screenshot
Not that visually appealing, however unique and unusual. Wood in use.

Texture Screenshot
Grunge can be used not only in personal web-sites, but also in galleries and blogs.

Grungy Free Fonts

5 Excellent Free Grunge Fonts A selection of free “grunge” or “eroded” typefaces.

Texture Screenshot

Bleeding Cowboys Font Free for personal use. PC / Mac OS X.

Texture Screenshot

Grungy Icons

Stretched, torn and dirty: grunge icons at its best. They don’t necessarily fit to all designs, however it’s nice to have them ready to hand once you might need them.

Grungy Olive Icons This set by designed by Dryicons fits not only to grungy cloth and weapons. 28 icons in the .png-format. 16 x 16, 24 x 24, 32 x 32, 48 x 48 and 128 x 128 px. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You can do with them almost everything you might ever need to.

Icons Screenshot

Grungy Asphalt Icons Another set, in a different color.

Icons Screenshot

Grungy Textures

The Best Textures Flickr Group offers excellent textures, among them also pretty colorful grunge textures. More than 900 images offered in a variety of sizes.

Texture Screenshot

Torley Textures presents 11 sets with quite impressive images in the size 512x512 — available in the .png-format.

Texture Screenshot

DeviantArt: Textures is probably one of the largest sources for textures. For instance you can find excellent textures by searching for rust, grunge or wood. The choice is enormous, so you better take a portion of patience with you: advertisements are annoying, but the search is worth it.

Texture Screenshot
Example: Flaky Old Gold

Urbandirty collects the dirty of cities. Virtually, of course, in form of textures. No, this is not beautiful, but real. The collection includes 291 photos in three sizes. Released under the Creative Commons License.

Texture Screenshot

Free Grunge textures from TextureKing A growing collection of grungy textures, available for free download. 319 textures.

Texture Screenshot

10 Grunge, Rusty and Dirty Tileable Textures This is a collection of ten 1000×1000 pixels seamless textures. These textures were created using Filter Forge plugin. And they are free.

Texture Screenshot

Grunge Textures Craig Jewells texture set contains 211 photos on Flickr. Different themes: rock, wood, rust, floors and more.

Texture Screenshot

24 Free High-Res Textures By Bittbox. There is also a set of Photoshop brushes made from these grungy textures. There are 12 brushes in the set, and they are all 2500px. Available for CS3, CS1, and in PNG formats.

Texture Screenshot

Grungy Paper Textures

Scanned Scrapbook Papers Set 1 with 14 themes, Set 2 with 12 themes.

Texture Screenshot
Set 2

Lovelamp presents 7 textures which look like wallpapers (real wallpapers, not desktop wallpapers).

Texture Screenshot

PapierScans offers more paper scans; 12 images in high resolution.

Texture Screenshot

4 Free High-Resolution Grungy Paper Textures The full-size images are in the 2005x3000px resolution.

Texture Screenshot

Grungy Brushes, Corners etc.

Grunge Brushes Photoshop set.

Texture Screenshot

50 Free Vector Grunge Corners Formats: AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, Ill8. Source grunge is also included to let you play around with.

Texture Screenshot

RisingSun Brushes This set contains brushes of the size 1280x1024px.

Texture Screenshot

Grunge Brushes Photoshop set.

Texture Screenshot

Dumpster Brushes 8 Photoshop brushes created from photos of old dumpsters. All brushes are over 800px.

Texture Screenshot

XiconTexturesX 15 icon with two large scratchy / grungy textures in .pat (Photoshop Patterns Format).

Texture Screenshot