Designing something isn’t as easy as most people would like to believe it is. We enjoy watching other people’s work, but when it comes to our own, we might hit a slump every now and then.
Some people experience an artist’s block, which is when you can’t for the love of you find a way to overcome what is lacking, to find a good design and do something creative, make something new.
Well, if you want to design your next site and are feeling that little block that Frank never felt, consider this advice as you go forward.
You could use more textures in your site’s design.
What Are Textures?
Surely this doesn’t refer to the textures we find in video games? Well, you could use those as a part of your design, but you would have to mix them so as not to get a copyright notice. That would make a really creative design, indeed.
Textures can be found in a lot of art, obviously, though web design could use more textures, to draw attention to certain elements, or to draw attention from certain elements.
How to Use Textures
This is entirely up to you, because being creative is one of the keys of making web design work, albeit some would argue that you could do with some patterns and following trends if you really want to succeed.
Those people aside, you should probably consider two typical approaches to using textures, realism and prominence.
Realism invokes a feeling of familiarity, using objects from geometry or shapes which people know, to tell a story about something. This could work in most scenarios, but is less adventurous.
Prominence refers to how much a texture stands apart from its surrounding, how much it contrasts what is around it. This is often more daring and in the right hands, would definitely turn eyes in a good way.
Beware of the Pattern Trap
Textures are not patterns, as you know. Patterns are often mixed with textures, or rather, people mix them up. Patterns have clearly discernible tiles which repeat after a while. Textures have nothing that you could discern, particularly not something that repeats.
Using textures has a very different effect to using patterns. The latter is often more conservative and is less likely to have a drastic effect on the visitor.
What Textures Do
Textures could do a couple of things for you and the first and most obvious one that comes to mind is guiding one’s attention. By using a texture, you can point to a certain part of the page, where you want your visitors to spend the most time.
However, textures can also have another effect, that of emotion. This effect is as important as the first one and in some designs, more important.
These are some of the reasons why you should use textures in your web design and why you should do it more often. Don’t just slap them on, but think where they could have the most impact.
