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 espite what I said about the advantages of flat
textureless colors, many web design compositions require something
more complex and natural-looking. The first technology to come
to a designer's rescue is, of course, photography with its immense creative
opportunities and inexhaustible diversity.
Not surprisingly, in the world of complex textures one can also
draw a distinction between "high" and
"low" design styles. Professional designers prefer to look
for texture novelty in unusual places. Playing the irrelevance game, they like to
take images for their backgrounds which aren't easy to
identify---especially given that in the background role, they're
often artificially faded and/or blurred.
Theoretically, whatever photography has to offer in the texture
realm is directly related to the specific way it combines
colors. From this point of view, photos are unusually
color-rich (and grayscale photos are, so to say, rich of grays)
compared to other types of graphics. Most importantly, color
transitions in photos have complex nonlinear shapes and widely
varying sharpness---but they are never too crisp.
That's why photos, in contrast, make great backgrounds and fills
for sharp-edged text and geometric primitives, and that's why soft
gradients and blurring seem so connatural to digitized
photography. (And that's why photos look so nice with
feathered edges or transparency gradients, such as the one I used
on the Quiotix site.)
After all, Gaussian blur by itself is but a mathematical model of
the optical (that is, photographic) effect of looking through an
out-of-focus lens.
Thus, we could say that photos, along with artificial "soft"
effects such as blurring, shadows, gradients, etc., represent
another class of textures directly opposed to the flat color and
sharp-edged geometric forms and patterns. And since these two
texture classes have more than
one contrasting aspect, designers have successfully used them
together to produce great-looking, sensibly integrated compositions. |
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I feel that by now, some of my readers may be wondering, "what
the heck has this all to do with textures?" Indeed, popular
notion applies the word "texture" mostly to images representing some
real-world surfaces such as marble, bricks, or wood. These
"textures" or "backgrounds" are a very popular theme on amateur web
pages, and the innumerable "web art collections" out there offer
tons of such building materials at no cost.
I don't mean to say that any imitation of a material texture is
unconditionally objectionable. But please, if you're tempted
to spread an oh-so-beautiful marble texture under your page's stuff,
think twice: Would you feel really cosy in a house built of marble
slabs? Are you sure you're using this decoration because your page
can't be without, or simply because you want to outshine a page of
your neighbor's? Material textures may be beautiful by themselves, but
when used without proper consideration, they often look
pretentious (not to mention that sometimes they make it
difficult to read the text).
You may, of course, use a bitmap texture provided that all of its
aspects---overall color tone, sharpness, size and direction of its
strokes---are a good match (either contrasting or supporting) for
other page elements. Not unlikely, when you begin analyzing
a texture candidate with all of the important points in mind, you'll
find that it damages rather than improves your page, and that plain
non-textured color (if sensibly chosen) would work much better. |
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All this said, it can't be denied that many designers, not satisfied
with the "flat" and "soft" options, have used either rough, harsh, or soft
naturalistic textures with great effect. Having said that, the front
page of the Fitch
Seattle site, with its modest use of type and graphics, the look-and-feel
is that of a soft blurred background of a photographic image which was probably
manipulated in a an image editing application like Photoshop. Another thing
that's interesting about this site is that the background changes each time
you visit the site. |
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There are, of course, more conventional examples. The site of Hornall
Anderson Design Works uses a simple gradient in a vertical bar and
semi-transparent text that rotates horizontally onscreen, reminiscent
of a marquee sign. As you highlight the text, it moves to the center of
the bar and the white intensifies.
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To summarize, if you really need a complex photographic or material
texture for your graphics, what you should look for is not an exact
reproduction of some real-world surface. To see how nicely a
computer screen can imitate wood or brick might have been
amusing several years ago, but now most viewers are left unimpressed
by the see-it's-almost-real sort of tricks. Also, you rarely can
"add a texture" to an almost ready page, because the texture
solution of your design, much like its dominant colors and overall
composition, should be determined before even a preliminary draft
can be put forward.
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