Tom Bishop.biz - Website Design - Basic Design Elements

Introduction Basic Design Elements Overview Column Width Backgrounds Logos Fonts Images Sounds Hyperlinks Site Elements Clients
		Backgrounds One quality of web pages is that the text and images can be displayed against a background color or image. That background can be applied to the whole page or just to a column or even, as is the case with this page, to what's called a layout cell, which is what this text is displayed within. On this page, the page has a black background, the column has a tranparent background so that the black of the page is visible, and this layout cell has a textured purple background. While a page can have either a solid color or a textured background, some backgrounds work better than others. Background textures like this purple one are tiled, like linoleum. If the squares blend together well, it works. If not, it's distracting. I've created some examples of background images which you can see displayed behind both text and an image if you click on the small square at the end of this sentence. Almost any background can be made to work, depending on the desired effect. Any page or column may have a different background from the rest, but staying consistent is often the best way to go.

	Arrowleaf balsamroot covers the sunny hillsides in early summer. A relative of the sunflower, the ragged yellow blooms are several inches across.
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Plain Purple		Textured Purple	Red Gauze	Clouds
Above are four different background images that could replace the black background displayed in this box. Clicking on one will display that image as a tiled background. The plain purple is simple but plain and the text is a bit harder to read. The red gauze background is too light for the text to be legible, so the font color would have to be changed. And the clouds, which look fine by themselves, are very busy when tiled. To return to the Backgrounds page, click here.