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Showcase Of Beautiful Textured Web Designs
Textures have become more popular and been put to greater use in recent years. They’re not limited to Web design either; textures of all kinds are used in print design, illustration, traditional art, TV commercials… you name it! Texture is one of the best ways to add depth to your design, whether it’s subtle noise on a clean vector illustration or a lot of grunginess throughout a layout.
Over the last weeks we collected numerous examples of beautiful textured Web designs to inspire you, followed by a small collection of links to help you get started in using textures in your own designs.
If you like this post, you may be interested in reading some of our other texture-related articles:
[Offtopic: by the way, have you already visited Smashing Magazine's Facebook fan page? Join the community for a stream of useful resources, updates and giveaways!]
Textured Web Designs
Texture Downloads
- Texture Lovers
- Lost and Taken
- Zen Textures
- Love Textures
- WebTreats ETC
- Circlebox Textures
- Texture Vault
- Textur.es
A community-driven growing gallery of freely available textures.
Texture Tutorials
- Create a Cartoon Grunge Website Layout
- Create a Green Grunge Web Layout
- How to Create a Textured Grungy 3D Type Design
- Texture with Layer Modes
- Design a Stylish Retro Game Boy Poster
- Add Visual Texture in 3 Easy Steps
- Create a Texture Based Poster
(al)
Callum Chapman is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator based in Cambridge, UK. He is the creative blogger behind Circlebox Blog, a design related blog offering articles, inspiration, tutorials and free, high-resolution textures. Drop him a line at Twitter!
(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...- 55 Comments
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January 25th, 2010 11:30 amI am not that familiar with web design terms. Would you consider flash sites to be “textured”? Whenever i see a flash site I think it has unbelievable depth and that is what this article is about. An example is below. Thanks
Allstate Insurance motorcycle quotes-
Allstate Insurance-GarageDavid Lipsky
Advocate for Allstate
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- 3October 29th, 2009 8:03 am
Great collection, only seen a handful of these before. I love a well textured website design.
- 4October 29th, 2009 8:06 am
Not a big fan of such complex visuals, for websites & user-interfaces.
The Graphics in those websites are really good though.
- 5October 29th, 2009 8:40 am
Thank you for the mention guys!
- 6October 29th, 2009 8:42 am
You missed one of the best: Check out the portfolio of Elder Jerez, amazing use of textures: http://www.progressiveone.com
- 7October 29th, 2009 8:42 am
Nice to see some sites with more creative and relevant textures other than the cliché ‘grunge’ effect.
- 8October 29th, 2009 8:46 am
Some real cool designs here.
- 9October 29th, 2009 9:09 am
excellent creative !!! very useful for me!! awesome creators!!!
- 10October 29th, 2009 9:16 am
Great collection—full of sites I haven’t seen before (so rare in these kind of posts these days)! Kudos.
- 11October 29th, 2009 9:19 am
Gripping stuff!
- 12October 29th, 2009 9:47 am
As pretty as some are, I can’t see them being very practical. THS has a background image that weighs in at 1.1mb. Not exactly optimized!
- 13October 29th, 2009 10:06 am
Glad you like it – it took a while to put this one together! Quite a lot of research went in to finding unseen sites by both me and Vitaly. Thanks for the links guys, I’ve bookmarked them for a future post! ;)
- 14October 29th, 2009 10:46 am
Great roundup! I think the {ths} one is pretty inspiring. Another example of combining different textures to create depth: http://aggressivepanhandler.com
- 15October 29th, 2009 11:17 am
Seriously? Background images? Yes these are nicer than the cement and wood grain textures of fifteen years ago, but it’s still basically the same thing.
I guess I’m with the crowd that doesn’t much care what color of paint is on the outside of the store. I’m interested in what’s inside. And I’ll guarantee you the inside doesn’t look like the outside, most times.
- 16October 29th, 2009 11:20 am
fabulous collection!
- 17October 29th, 2009 11:23 am
Nice collection. Better than the of last year :) More my kind of stuff ^^
I think you should add http://nocreativity.com/blog/ too. The header and footer are pieces of artwork! - 18October 29th, 2009 11:26 am
I LOVE THIS! I’m so happy you’ve posted this, this is exactly my style and I’ve been lacking inspiration of late, brill! Thanks!
- 19October 29th, 2009 11:43 am
Great and inspiring collection. Thanks.
- 20October 29th, 2009 11:56 am
Some really unique designs here, Brown Bag films has been a favorite site of mine for awhile.
- 21October 29th, 2009 12:07 pm
Texture has been a growing trend in web design and I hope it’s here to stay. I love the style. The trick here is to incorporate textures without making the designs too heavy. Many of these examples here show that texture and clean design can work together beautifully.
Great selections, love so many.
- 22October 29th, 2009 12:55 pm
Awesome round up! Textured is a great design style that doesn’t get enough press. Not only is it difficult to design, but converting to HTML is no walk in the park.
- 23October 29th, 2009 1:43 pm
Oh, wow. Remarkable.
- 24October 29th, 2009 2:58 pm
Some genuinely beautiful and clever sites – most are portfolio sites it would seem. No harm in that. Translating this into the corporate online world might not be the way to go but inspirational nonetheless.
Well done SM. Keep up the great work.
- 25October 29th, 2009 4:29 pm
FYI the Handcrafted CSS link is broken.
- 26October 29th, 2009 5:11 pm
Thanks for the mention and great collection. Congrates !
- 27October 29th, 2009 5:40 pm
Hello. My name is *input your name here*. I’m a designer and….
AHHHHHHHHHH!! :)
- 28October 29th, 2009 9:19 pm
Thanks for mention Eliseos You guys rock!
- 29October 29th, 2009 10:11 pm
Beautyful collections!!!!!!!!!
- 30October 29th, 2009 11:52 pm
Thanks for the mention dude and great collection. Congrates !
- 31October 30th, 2009 12:05 am
Congrats….Nice collection
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- 33October 30th, 2009 1:44 am
Great!
- 34October 30th, 2009 1:45 am
Martin Anderle’s site is totally gorgeous!!
- 35October 30th, 2009 2:22 am
Now that’s a roundup. Love texture and love learning how to better use it, especially in web design.
- 36October 30th, 2009 2:26 am
Thanks for taking the time to collect these beatiful sites of inspiration!
- 37October 30th, 2009 3:12 am
Amazin!
- 38October 30th, 2009 3:48 am
I post a news about this post in our 53mondays blog. We very happy in agency ^^.
- 39October 30th, 2009 3:50 am
Some awesome work there – really impressive stuff. Check out In Safe Hands Childcare for another good use textured background
- 40October 30th, 2009 4:53 am
Thank you guys at Smashing Magazine for mentioning our site!
- 41October 30th, 2009 6:07 am
hey, thanks for mentioning my site – nice collection :)))
greetz from frankfurt - 42October 30th, 2009 6:23 am
I can’t help but find the header in the second example funny.
“Hello! I’m Graphic Designer who is passionate for creating modern and functional design that provokes feelings.”
Nice to meet you Graphic Designer, thanks for provoking feelings. I’m not going to say what type of feelings, just feelings in general will do.
- 43October 30th, 2009 6:27 am
thanks for recognizing “Trinity Irish Pub” it was a tuff one :)
- 44October 30th, 2009 7:48 am
many of these showing that usability and personality are awesome together, a break from the tired clinical interfaces… faves: brown bag, ths, story pixel, sushi/robots
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- 46October 30th, 2009 9:38 am
Thank you so much for mentioning our website – and thank you so much to our designer too. Thank you :-)
We really like some of the others to..
- 47October 30th, 2009 10:04 am
Thank you Smashing Magazine for this mention! This is a dream come true. Cheers!
- 48October 30th, 2009 10:46 am
awesome reference post, but am i the only one who is sick of seeing layers and layers of dirty paper, stickies and paperclip collages on every other site?
- 49October 30th, 2009 10:25 pm
@Mike
I agree. I’m tired of seeing every other website I visit using these design elements in them.Though, I do like this collection. Inspirational!
- 50October 31st, 2009 5:22 am
I love textured sites.
- 51October 31st, 2009 6:11 am
I love these designs, but they are just too much. It is a puzzle to read what the content of the site is sometimes. Everything in moderation, seems to be forgotten here, sometimes. Many are excellent. Great inspiration.
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- 53November 16th, 2009 5:05 pm
Thanks for the feature! Minor correction: the site is Lilly’s Table, not Lilly Stable.
- 54November 23rd, 2009 7:12 pm
Y, it’s very nice, thx.
- 55December 9th, 2009 8:56 pm
Thunder Fuel is awesome! I love the background of it. so cool.
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Good article!