In the past, web design has impressed us with their shiny gradients, smooth expressions and simple and bold colors. But the use of textures, within the design, has never really reached the popular heights. At least, until now.

Mainstream web design has started to use more and more textures within the layout design. Albeit, with lots of subtlety. Mixing modern and simplistic layouts with an ageless and light texture to carefully highlight and enhance certain areas of the design, has shown to be a very effective technique. In this article we take a look at some of the best examples.

Tangled Decals

This web site outstandingly mixes background textures with the minimum usage of typography. It not only looks great and also brings this design to life.

Dog House Cards

This is a smooth and modern design that employs a woody texture in the background. This great and uncluttered approach makes the items and luminous images somehow emerge from your screen.

Corvus Art

A colored website pattern featuring an elusive texture background that mixes with the profound header. The typeface really stands out in this design disclosing the primary content area on top of the page:

Jason Bradbury

Almost the entire website has a textured effect. The mixture of the textures and the graphic typography is simply amazing and makes this website easy to remember.

Carlos – Partez Sur La Piste

The blacker textured background of this web design eventually blows over into a solid background at the center of the page. The website has a somewhat strange but very innovative design. Check it out:

Church on the Rock

Sollievo

Sollievo uses a brown background with a subtle texture that stands out when combined with the torn-paper effect of the main content area giving the website a more substantial textured feel.

Team Fannypack

This web design is styled like a newspaper that employs some lovely typography and graphics. To give the feel of a newspaper, the design also uses a creased paper texture.

Sienna Online

Here, a dark black background is used for the main content area whilethe header holds the texture.

Snopp

This is a great example of a simple and minimalist website design that employs subtle and soft textures in the background.

Hugs for Monsters

This effective web design uses heavy graphics in the foreground and some very fragile textures in the background.

Kim – The Movie

The header is textured with yellow and black colors along with a bright textured effect in the background.

Jumbalaya

The website of Jumbalaya holds a ragged and antique feel with its use of a dark textured background and bold typography.

No Sleep For Sheep

No Sleep For Sheep has a very interesting design that uses a blue grungy texture that works as the sky behind the silhouettes of the curvy hills, fluffy clouds and, of course, the sheep.

Progressive One

The Progressive One design employs a mixture of textures and patterns, and making excellent use of a texturised dividing line to make the site easy to view.

Street Youth Couture

Fundo Los Paltos

Fundo Los Paltos’ design has been inspired by nature, with some fantastic header images, a colorful logo and silhouetted-styled branches over-hanging the top of the design. A soft-grunge texture is used in the background to complement these features, and it works great!

Cesky Culibrk

Yet another newspaper style design, and this one also uses a crumpled paper texture to make the newspaper look like a an old style real-life newspaper. The newspaper itself is also placed on top of a texture, giving the design more depth.

The Bold Italic

The Bold Italic design has a very popular vintage-style, using a bunch of low opacity textures built upon each other to produce one awesome looking design.

Crush Lovely

This is a very simple, smooth and modern design that uses fine noisy textures in the background to make the fresh objects and dazzling images pop from your screens.

Five Points Interactive

This web design makes use of a much-loved notepad-style design. Several elements are pulled together to create a lovely theme such as real paper textures, watercolor textures and beautiful floral patterns.

Third Culture Studios

This Web design makes use of a grungy brown/cream texture in the background which brings the typography and content area to life.

Agency Ball

Agency Ball Summer 2010 uses a much simpler design which uses simple paper textures with bold typography to pull together a lovely and attractive theme.

Word Refuged

All For Design

Here is some pure inspiration for designers who want to use every popular subtle noise texture available for their website’s background.

Kaleidoscope App

The Kaleidoscope website uses the a combination of textures and patterns highly effectively.

Francesco Molezzi

This website employs a delicate paper texture which adds depth to the overall design and also brings those awesome images to the forefront.

Bright Creative

This website is designed with true creativity. The use of CSS effects is simply superb and creates an incredibly interactive effect that pulls the overall look of the design off with some attractive background textures.

Night Owl Interactive

In this web design, you will see how effectively you can communicate your business and your message to your potential customers. It has a relatively darker background with heavy textures that personifies the night time when owls are active.

Get Review App

A simple and soothing paper background texture is used in this design.

Vector Stories

This website uses a good deal of truly fresh and interactive elements, including the central clickable ‘Let’s get started’ button. It has several textures in different areas such as in the main background, the content background, and each little element within the sites content.

Sprout Fund

The content area of this site has an extraordinarily slight texture that is not at first noticed behind its bold header.

Cogitatur

In this web design, a slightly heavier texture is used making this website memorable.