Design Notebook: Nature Textures Library

Hello all. I wanted to share with you my new column for CRAFT, Design Notebook. I (finally) wrote my first post this week, on creating your own textures library. I've included an excerpt here on TT, and you can check out the post in its entirety on the CRAFT blog. I've included some select shots from this project — please feel free to grab them for your own use, copyright free!



As a designer, I have a great love as well as a professional need for visual lexicons. Type faces, illustration, ephemera, old signage — you name it, I collect it. Textures are no different. It's not infrequent that a texture is needed for a design project, and what better way to amass a royalty-free collection than to generate it yourself!

In this post I will address some basic tips for finding and capturing textures with your digital camera, and share with you some selects from my nature texture library. All of these photos were taken while hiking in the beautiful regional parks of Northern California. They are free for you to grab and use however you want — have fun!

In the next post, I will go over how to zoom waaaaaay in on your photos to create a specific color pallet from individual pixels using imaging software. Stay tuned!








A special note of thanks. This project was inspired by Bay Area artist Matthew Jervis, who has been taking amazing texture shots and open sourcing them in a Facebook album. Super sweet idea! You can find more on Jervis at Kulture Hero.