Finding Seamless Background Patterns for Web Designs

For those Web Designers, or aspiring Web Designers, who have not yet explored the amazing colourlovers.com, please, do so now.

This site is a social community that allows users to create color palettes and seamless patterns (yes!), share them, then get feedback on how amazing (or not amazing) your design is.

What I find the site is best used for: exploring patterns and color combos that are highly rated, then putting them together and using them in my own designs. There are over 1 million to choose from.

You don’t even have to have an account to use the art! Just opposite click on the image and save and pattern or palette you enjoy!

To explore patterns, click here.

To explore color palettes, click here.

Adobe Fireworks. Seriously. It Rocks.

For some time we at STS have been teaching a course called “Graphic Design for the Web,” which teaches course attendees to use Adobe Fireworks to create great user interfaces (see this link to sign up for a class).

What I find interesting about our class is that we don’t call it Fireworks. Our Photoshop classes are called Photoshop, our Illustrator classes are called Illustrator, so why not call the Fireworks class by it’s name too? The answer is simple. No one knows what Fireworks is or how powerful it can be.

From my own experience, I know that I use Fireworks to slay all my web designs in record time and with style, but you don’t have to take my word for it.

The good folks at Smashing Magazine recently published an article called “The Power of Fireworks: What Can You Achieve with It?” The article not only discusses what Fireworks is and how it can be used, but it also gives quite a few friendly tips on designing.

Check out the article here!