The MySpace phenomena caught me by surprise. I’ve watched my kids evolve from Neopets to Xanga before migrating to MySpace. While the whippersnappers occasionally ask me to help them with graphics stuff, they’re quite self-sufficient these days. When the topic of seamless textures came up recently, I realized that thousands of tiles I’ve created over the years might work as MySpace backgrounds. So I’ve started posting them on my site for all to enjoy.

I first became fascinated by seamless textures while working on The Photoshop Plug-ins Book, way back when.

At one point, it seemed like I had darn near every commercial Photoshop Plug-in … my shelves are still proudly stocked (though the goods might be dusty). Yes indeed, one of the wonderful benefits of writing how-to books about computer software was that I never had to spend my own cash on that software. The developers were very kind to me, back in the day.

When a new plug-in would arrive, I’d spend hours and hours fiddling with the software, late into the night. Many of these sessions were texture-creating blurs. I’d sit down at the computer after dinner and not get up until midnight… after creating dozens of unique seamless background textures.

I thought the seamless textures might be useful in 3D rendering or interface design. Quite honestly, most of my tiles were pretty wild, so I didn’t envision many being used as web page backgrounds, other than the most subtle designs.

But today’s MySpace users aren’t bound by conventional aesthetics. Many folks throw design caution to the wind… and too many MySpace backgrounds tend to be overdone. A perfect audience! I figured I’d get a bunch of these out there (along with production notes) and see if folks dig ‘em (or not). I’ll cover the spectrum from mild to wild, eventually …

Continue Reading: Free MySpace Backgrounds