Quick Review - SubtlePatterns - Awesome Background Patterns

Key Takeaways

hello Gary Simon up design course calm today we're going to do a quick review of a really good resource for designers called subtle patterns calm alright so subtle patterns is a list of 380 plus it's growing currently by the time recording this there's 380 different background patterns that you can use in your designs for a multitude of purposes including web design print design etc so I'm just going to do a real quick review we're going to switch over to the screen and I'll show you just how you can use it in a very basic sense alright so here we are at subtle patterns calm and I see right away the background here is just meant to look transparent I or emulate you know the typical Photoshop transparency and so I if you hover over all these different patterns and I think there's something like over 380 currently at the time of recording this video you can preview it on the actual website background which is kind of handy I so there's all sorts of different types of backgrounds in a really cool graphical illustrative type of backgrounds and then there's textured back backgrounds as well and if you know anything about Photoshop you know that you're not limited or restricted just using these backgrounds as they stand so let's take a background like this one right here gray washed wall all right so if you click download it will download a zip file and you open that zip file up you have the folder name right here and then you have a a bigger version or smaller version so if we double-click on this will open up in Photoshop will see this is the background size for this particular pattern which repeats well I if you wanted to use this in like a real world scenario with icon on website or on a div background or something like that I was just real quickly I'm going to get up a document here something like around just for now so it fits within my current resolution I'm just going to do 8 59 x 600 and at a hundred percent that fits well within this area and let's say I we have I don't know maybe like a dark blue sort of background and let's also say that you know this is the top of the website for example and you want to have it kind of in its own container with content beneath it all right let's come over here we'll take this ctrl a ctrl C real quickly or yeah yeah what we can do is just go to edit define pattern will call this gray wash I think that's what it was called and now that it's a pattern we can double click on our rectangle and go to pattern overlay and select from our list right here and this is the one that we just selected all right so when you do that you have several different ways and methods both destructive and non-destructive I methods of manipulating the look of this so you're not confined to just using it as is so one such way a non destructive ways by just messing around with these other gradient overlay and possibly probably not the gradient overlay because it wouldn't be uniform but color overlay for sure so if we turn on color light cover the color overlay you'll see that I you can't see it because the blend mode is normal but if you take this and you hit your down arrow key or you just select them individually you'll see that we can begin to change the appearance of this so that's kind of handy and so depending on which overlay mode you're using or not using you can see how it affects the appearance alright so actually let me go back real quick and turn that back on hit OK another way is to right-click and specify rasterize layer style and then you have these that you can adjust up here so you can take your adjustment layers take the brightness down maybe the contract up a lot and if you only want it to affect that layer click on that button right there and you can also apply all these other adjustment layers like hue and saturation as well so let's say for example we hit color color eyes we wanted to give it a blue and the saturation as well you can play with now maybe something like that then obviously you can see going from this we can adjust it make decent amount of adjustments that way although what you would probably do because you want to maintain the exact size because this is something that repeats is do it over here and then once you know what you want it to look like you could go ahead and apply specifically to this size since it is a very specific size because this repeats 350 x 2 59 but anyhow that's just a quick rundown of how you can use subtle patterns is calm in order to get some really cool patterns and textures for any type of design really especially it's especially useful obviously for um let's see here web design obviously so yeah very cool designs I like I said there's currently I think it lists it's somewhere how many patterns they oh right here yeah 382 patterns awesome stuff there's also a photoshop plugin as well what you don't have I which would definitely be handy all right Gary Simon of design course calm I've recently launched design course premium and that is a one-on-one training service along with a couple of other things currently I'm going to be adding to this visual identity design course wise banner photoshop maker and you can visit design course calm / premium to learn about all three of these one-on-one training with me and it's for a flat monthly fee alright subscribe here on youtube if you haven't yet alright goodbye