Sickdesigner

You know how, often times, clients demand that your design needs to pop more? Well, welcome to a 5 part article filled with easy tips & tricks to get that lovely design of yours to pop, while keeping quality high. In this episode: Textures & Patterns.

Textures and patterns

Textures and patterns (referenced TPs from now on, yeah i know it sounds like the other tp but it’s not, so please keep your dirty mind out of the gutter) are useful for rendering realism. By now everyone has grown tired of the badly understood and implemented “Web 2.0″ graphical concept, so TPs come as a breath of fresh air to almost any design.

Now let’s see how to put them to good use, lest the gods of design will get angry and smite thee. Enough fun, time for the serious stuff.

Tip 1: One of the most important things to keep in mind is to not go overboard; a maximum of two (textures or patterns) per design is sufficient. You can achieve all the effects you need by playing around with scale, color or opacity. Also, be subtle in your focus. TPs are design aids, not focal points of the design.

Tip 2: It’s also a good idea to edit the TPs you’re using and make them blend and match the design. Most of the time a luminosity & opacity change are sufficient, but sometimes you have to get creative to make them work, never let them be “out of whack”.

Tip 3: Patterns are, by their repetitive nature boring and your job, as a designer, is to break that monotony. This is easily achievable using lights and shadows.

Tip 4: Try to think ahead. Someone, somewhere has to make your mockup into a functional website (it might even be you). So don’t make yours or their lives harder. If you have a texture that’s not absolutely huge, blend it into a solid color so it doesn’t appear chopped off on large screens.

Here we’ll be looking on some successful stories, and why they are so.

01

Let’s take for instance Chrush + Lovely

They have an abundance of textures, but they’re separated on each page, and you can clearly see the distinction between the sections. Every element blends in perfectly with the chosen color palette; nothing is out of place.

02

The Croquis uses a large watercolor backdrop to provide visual interest to the top part of the design, as well as some much needed contrast.

03

The O’Reilly’s Pub website has a lot of textures and patterns, but it’s not too much because they’re subtle and used to help content come alive, not hide it. Textures are often one of the best ways to set the mood of a design piece. And O’Reilley’s aced that one, although one must admit: the logo doesn’t really belong in this picture, right? So, beer, anyone?

Remember to use textures and patterns in a subtle manner: too many often result in lack of coherence and legibility, too few and you don’t get that POP factor. Stick around for the second episode of our mini-series and let those designs go-a-poppin’!

by Liviu Dobre