Smooth and shiny has outstayed its welcome, so here's Paul Wyatt with a collection of textures to give your work more tactile character.
The sterile, shiny and ridiculously reflective world of Web 2.0 design is fortunately suffering a backlash.
Design is becoming tactile again. Texture, grime and grit is now where it's at. High quality texture images abound on the web. Most of these are free and easily applied to any design using one of the blending modes in Photoshop. For best results use "Overlay" or "Multiply" and experiment with the opacity settings. Overlay texture upon texture to achieve unusual depth and substance. Here's our collection of top ten textures which you can download for free.
For more, see our roundup of where to find the best free textures.
Like an extreme close up of one of the original Star Trek uniforms, this sparkly velour fabric from TextureKing will have your layouts beaming with vibrancy.