We reveal the best sites to find high-quality, free background textures for use in your designs.
Background textures are a great way to give depth and originality to your designs and go hand in hand with vector-based work. Even better, there are thousands of free textures available to download from the web with little fuss.
Here are the best places to find more free background textures, to get you started and experimenting and building your own personal collection.
Lost and Taken is one of my favourite websites for free background textures. There are a variety of categories of textures to choose from, and you have the choice of downloading individual textures one by one or downloading them all in a zip file at the bottom of the post. Whether you're looking for vintage film filters, old stained notebook pages, or dozens of other interesting and intriguing categories of background textures, you will be more than satisfied with the variety on offer.
Graphic River is another platform created to satisfy the designer's craving for free background textures. Its library of textures is very impressive and easy to use, as well as offering other graphic-related downloadable files such as vectors and add-ons.
There's a heavy photographic influence to what Texture King has to offer: outdoor textures such as wood, concrete and bark, for example. Once you hit this site, you'll start to see countless possibilities in the ways these free background textures could be used.
Subtle Patterns provides textures to use directly onto web-related projects. A brilliant source of subtle (obviously) background textures for web designers.
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This Flickr album gives direct and free usage of a vibrant and high resolution set of free background textures, to be used directly or edited as you wish under a Creative Commons License.
Blog Spoon Graphics is a superb design blog offering a wide range of resources for designers. These include a great collection of subtle background textures, made Photoshop friendly, to be used and edited directly as layers.
Next page: more texture resources
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