As of late, rather than making my own, I’ve been using an increasing number of web resources for free web resources. The biggest time saver is for backgrounds and textures. Here’s a list of the ones I use most.

1. colourlovers.com
Before I discovered color schemer Colourlovers.com was my favorite color resource. But it’s still my favorite resource for user designed patterns. Personally, what makes it great from me is the community that rates patterns helping me to gauge how many people are also using a particular pattern.

2. bgmaker.ventdaval.com
This is actually more of a generator but if you head over to their gallery, you’ll see what I’m talking about. There’s hundreds of user generated patterns here that are free to use!

3. dinpattern.com
High quality, original patterns that I like but don’t use for my own work. Still, the UI is simple enough and I really like the preview function.

4. k10k.net
User generated content is all the rage these days and K10k sports a community of pattern makers that create pixelized designs.

5. squidfingers.com
Squidfinger offers a number of free classic and borderline autistic looking patterns, and the gallery UI is hideous. Want to search for only the top twenty patterns? Sorry, you can’t. Want to see the most popular pattern of all time? Sorry, you can’t.

Posted in design, patterns, web ~