http://urbandirty.com/ This contains 433 photos of gritty, rusty, worn paint etc.. urban textures free for usage. I could probably use some of the earthy textures for soil in my site. The link to grunge textures brings you to a another arsenal of terrific masonry etc. These textures give an organic presence to your web pages.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/564994@N20/pool/ Another great resource, however searching for leaves, trees, plants turns up few hits. Yet browsing through the “best textures” reveals some great samples. In other words the internal search engine doesn’t seem to work well.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/collections/72157594588432564/ Flikr has many other sources. This section offers some amazing free texture photos, found some great green vegetation samples.
http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/textures/ Some great swamp textures here, but the images couldn’t be copied without tracking them on another page. It would be better if you could copy them as you see them.
http://www.textureking.com/ Awesome textures found under specific categories. While flikr can send the user off into someones family stock photos, Texture King has links to other photos but you don’t end up looking at wedding images unless you want to.
http://www.grungetextures.com/ This is the same link I found through Urbandirty.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/29/grunge-style-in-modern-web-design/ Just when I thought these sites were getting redundant, this selection offers some really sharp texture images. A great variety and some weathered icons to choose from as well.
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/photoshop-tutorials-textures/ Urgent!!! I must return to this site. There are numerous links to great tutorials for creating textures in Photoshop. Some of them give a rudimentary outline of how they created some fairly realistic textures and I’m sure a lot of trial and error will occur before you can produce anything that looks as professional. Fortunately links to each designs author might resolve further inquiries.
http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/2007-more-web-design-trends-and-cliches Excellent overview of latest trends of design- texture of course is in but so are cartoon characters. The author, Stuart Brown, must spend a great deal of time online identifying design techniques.
http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/screen-resolutions-and-aspect-ratios-worldwide The article posted here complicates things even more with the fact that different regions favor different screen resolutions. Interesting, and I’ll try to keep this in mind.
Readings: In week 5 we began looking at texture in the Beaird text. This week we really got to explore some sites that can dramatically change the look of your site with texture but the text was Chapter 4 typography- a little confusing. In chpt 4 Beaird covers the reasons for choosing particular text styles and fonts. I’ve chosen a JUICE ITC font through composer for my “Green Gaia Growers” heading and a standard Aerial for the body text. The heading worked well in Mozilla Firefox but Internet Explorer did not present the heading with the same beauty. This doesn’t ruin the site but I could get around this with the text created as a graphic file in an image editor. The body text would be too much to consider. Text in images look great but you have to keep returning to an image editor if you want to changed the text without changing its style. Beaird proposes a Scalable Inman Flash Replacement(sIFR) as an alternative but it still seems to require more effort than necessary. For now I’ll stick with standard fonts.
Chapter 11 in Creating Web Sites- introduces us to ways of bringing people to your sites. Meta tags; hidden information tags that describe your site or list keywords can provide search engines with the appropriate links; submit your URL to an internet directory and search engine; share links with others directly; set up a hit counter and server log to keep track of traffic. This is potentially the most important chapter of all. If your going to produce a useful website you better get it out there or it will just lurk in obscurity. Since Green Gaia Growers is solely a creation for this course I will not be promoting it. However, this chapter is earmarked for future reference.
Chapter 12 goes further with the concept of your site as a community. If you want your site to gain in popularity you need to provide interactive features. While television is unidirectional, the internet is about exchanging information. Internet users want to give feedback. For my site, I’ll have a link to the blog for this course. Here people could potentially let me know how wonderful it is, or more likely- how bland and primitive it is!!!