Crumpled

I'm starting to see the beauty of not creating every peice of every website absolutely from scratch. Sometimes the people who offer their code really know what they were doing. Especially in open source projects. Anyway I just completed my newest client website, which is at least partially based on an open source project, circle.sierraspiraldancers.com.

Every once in a while I experience the joy of creating image tiles. Image tiles are graphics that can be repeated infinitely on one axis or two to create a seemless background or texture. I like making them and I like finding them in the realworld, and then pixelizing them.

I took a picture of the linoleum in thalisha's grandparents house because I thought it would be a good one. and I once had a small collection of envelopes that had printed insides (security envelopes). I look for these tiles in video game textures, all linoleum floors, all wallpapers and textiles.

When a pattern designed to look random, cluttered, or disorganised doesn't repeat itself too often I take it as a sign of good craftsmanship. The further the distance before the inevitable duplication, the better quality the pattern.

On the web, the use of these patterns exploded as soon as browsers and html accomodated such a thing. and they sucked. they sucked sucked sucked. People were bad at making them, (designers weren't all that prominent on the web at the time.), any good (not repeating too often) one would load much slower than any bad one in the time where graphics took forever on your super slow dial-up modem. The good graphic software, and the computers that love them weren't readily available. The display of these crappy images made them a barfy nono upon the internets puberty. they were gone for a while, replaced with the more palateable solid colored background. But now all those old issues are gone, and the stigma against the background tile has expired.

I'm glad, because I like making them so much. If you ever doubted that I was a dork just consider my envelope collection. It's gone now, but you hadn't doubted anyway.