Subtle Patterns has been around for a pretty long while now. It's a great site. My designer colleagues use it quite a bit.
The only thing I wish it did was show the pattern size by default in the description. Some of them show it, but not all. And in my experience they vary a good bit.
Does anyone have any concrete information on what happened and how it was resolved? At that link, I only see HNers saying that it definitely wasn't domain expiration that was the problem, but no more information beyond that.
What license are the images? There is a license mention on the bottom of the website but to me that seems to cover the website only, not the downloaded images. It would be great if each zip would include a proper license.
ShareAlike means they're unusable for commercial applications. I suppose you can still use them on a website, but I'm not sure how much of the website you'd also have to make CC-BY-SA.
No, ShareAlike means you have to distribute them under the same licence. Unless there is a NoCommercial, that doesn't mean you can't sell them, you just aren't allowed to change to a more restrictive licence. IANAL.
Hey, Atle Mo here – founder of subtlepatterns.com.
What happened was that some guy some how managed to hijack the domain (ICANN is still working on a report to see what happened). He said he got it legally, but "would be willing to sell it back for €2.000. Right.
So I sent in all the documentation I had to the legal department of Instra, where he moved the domain.
They gave the domain back to me right away, and like I mentioned, ICANN is still working out a few things, but it will be back to my full ownership hopefully within a few weeks.
I can still access the admin site, so it's business as usual.
I'm thankful for all the support I got from Twitter users, email etc. Cheers!
Congratulations for getting the site back. And if I may use the opportunity, a heartfelt "thank you" for providing this resource. It has been ultra-helpful in the past for quick prototyping of good looking web pages.
It's a real gem, especially for someone who isn't as aesthetically astute, like me. I used it on a couple of websites I've been working on recently. [1][2]
The first texture looks like it's broken because there is no border. I thought it wasn't loading at all, but it was just the exact same as the background on the site.
Edit: nevermind.. I must have clicked directly on the preview button when i changed focus or something.
Sorry to go a little off topic, but I'm wondering if someone remember a background pattern/texture generator posted here on HN a few months a go. I lost the bookmark. I only remember it has a dark background. Thanks.
Some of these are quite strong and contrasty and very repetitive in a small scale and thus slightly migraine inducing.
With the horizontal repetition they also mess with the angle of your eyes / distance perception (as there are multiple transpositions where they correlate perfectly).
I like subtle, very random and smooth patterns a lot.
Related, if you wanted to make your own patterns (and then perhaps upload to subtlepatterns.com :-)) check out this iphone app: http://patternshooter.com/
i don't know if it's my monitor or colour settings or what, but some of them don't seem to do anything when i click the preview button (e.g. "straws" and "swirl" from the current front page)
The only thing I wish it did was show the pattern size by default in the description. Some of them show it, but not all. And in my experience they vary a good bit.
Also, on the Github page, there is a .pat zip of all the patterns which makes it even better https://github.com/subtlepatterns/SubtlePatterns