Well, we don’t think that wood is a new revolutionary trend — after all, it
was used and explored for years. However, since wood isn’t used everywhere — in
correct and wrong contexts — experimenting with it makes perfectly sense.
Still, there are a number of options beyond wood: e.g. fabric patterns, tiles,
ground, stone, walls, bricks, stiches, cardboard, ceramics, decay, rust, old
tapes, illustrations, plastic and glass.
In this post we present a showcase of sites using textures and
patterns— we want to focus designer’s attention on design options
available beyond wood. Reason: we strongly believe that vibrant, realistic
background images are becoming a new trend. If it sounds familiar to you, you
are absolutely right: we’ve seen the same trend 8-10 years ago. The sources for
the background images are usually either photos (e.g. you can download free
textures in the Smashing Texture Library) or
illustrations created with Photoshop, Illustration etc.