Some time ago we shared our thoughts on website branding with you. In that blog we mentioned some of the visual elements that are usually part of a website. These elements usually represent your brand, which could be a product or a service.
Today we would like to focus on backgrounds, and the important role it plays in web design.
Backgrounds can be used in various ways to reinforce your brand or product online. It is one of the creative elements that your brand document should include.
When choosing a background, consider your mood board or inspiration board and the colours and images you identified to evoke or project a particular style or concept. There is (almost) no limit to what you can accomplish with all the wonderful tools that are available to web designers today.
Backgrounds can contain images, or it can be gradients or the moving particles that seems to be in vogue, or some kind of animation or even video. It really depends on your style and your preference.
A useful resource is Cool Backgrounds, an online tool that can help you to create “compelling, colorful images for blogs, social media, and websites. Beyond backgrounds, the images generated can be used as desktop wallpapers or cropped for mobile wallpapers“.
I used Cool Backgrounds to generate the image for this blog post, but you can choose the color and size as well as the effect that you prefer. Some of the options include colorful abstract triangles (as the one we used here), particles (or precise abstract triangles), CSS gradients, gradient topography (which are smooth layered shapes) or, lastly, immersive and compelling images (such as the ones you will find on Unsplash).
CSS Gradient is another resource that you can use to create a gradient background for your website. This site helps you to choose the colours, the degree of the gradient, as well as the opacity. You can also upload an image to the site and it will output the CSS that you require to achieve the desired effect.
We hope you find these resources useful.