design stuff: background images

A few useful hints on how to choose background images:

Your design will go in one of two directions: You will either have boxes inside of which you place your content or you will do a free floating layout, such as the one you see here on the easy peasy site. These are two distinct approaches which will also determine your background images. If you have things boxed then you can be far more adventuresome with your background since the boxes will see to it that the content of your site stands apart from whatever it is that is going on behind them. If you go for the free floating look however, then the background will need to have very very low contrast, it really needs to go all the way back, so that it doesn't interfere with your content, be it images or text.

However, even if you have boxes, it may still be a good idea to consider what sorts of visual material will be part of the actual content later on. If you plan on using lots of really colorful images then it may still be a good thing to have a background which will not interfere with that. If, on the other hand, your content is mostly text based with relatively few images, or always low saturated ones - then it may be a really good idea to have a strong background.

I created a dummy site for this course, so that I can show examples of what I am talking about without ruining the real thing. Here, I put boxes underneath the content and then placed very high contrast black and white images into the background. Since the boxes create enough of a separator this does seem to work.

Another thing is the subject matter itself: Going back to the scuba diving website which one class member is thinking of doing. In all likelihood most of his images will be underwater photographs and so forth. In which case a nice deep sea image, or an abstract image in strong blue hues will probably look really good as a background for that.

A word which you will hear me say a lot over the next weeks is Gestalt. Essentially what this means is that any design work has to be considered as a whole, every visual component has to be related to everything else through closure, through alignment, proximity, similarity etc. So, the background is only one component of a complex system which we will be building together. The good news is that in web design you can always go back and adjust things, change things, add and delete things if they are not working out. That said, it is still good work practice to think about future visual relations as you are putting some thought into a background for your website now.

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