Those paisley and other fancy patterned backgrounds

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I've started to notice that a good majority of nicely designed blogs (esp. web designer blogs) sport these detailed, fancy patterned backgrounds. The sort of patterned swirls and filligrees you would see in an expensive oriental rug or a strip of Victorian wallpaper.

Are all of these designers skilled enough with Fireworks or Photoshop to create these mini-masterpeices themselves, or are they getting them from an external source? If so, where?

And if they're doing it themselves, does anyone know of a resource/tutorial/walkthrough/discussion/etc that talks about how to do so?

cEM

[limbo]

CEM

You mean like this [csszengarden.com]?

It's probably a mix. The 'fleur de lille' and fontesque patterning can be created in illustrator packages reasonably easily. Fireworks could do it too - one of the benefits of vectors. Also, if you look at some of the fontsites (avoid the free ones) out there you will also see that they supply designers with symbolic fonts, no lettering. These come in all shapes and styles form the avant garde to art deco. Then its a case of using rotate, flip and repeat to create a 'wallpaper' effect. The example supplied above could have been created this way from just 3 elements.

[stever]

They're (honestly) not that difficult to do.

Take Fireworks. Look at the supplied Textures (there are also plenty of independent textures sites or you can make your own). Then play with duplicating the image with different rotations and at different levels of opacity. There are also commercial Fireworks extensions available which automate the process.

You beat me this time, limbo!

[Jon_King]

>>or are they getting them from an external source?

Absolutely, there are a bazillion free background tiles on the web. Do a search, there's some pretty good stuff out there.

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limbo, that's exactly the sort of think I meant! Your suggestion about the symbolic fonts is a good one. If you know a good resource, would you mind stickying me the url?

stever, thanks for the tips. Fireworks is the editor I have, but I use it only for the bare necessities (nav buttons, gradient backgrounds, image headers in a decent font). Now that I'm starting to get self-conscious about my conspicuous lack of graphical talent, maybe it's time to delve further into Fireworks' capabilities. Any suggestions (print or web) on where to start?

Jon, your comment spurred me to search one more time. I added 'tiles' to the search term and got some surprisingly good results.

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions.

cEM

[stever]

Now that I'm starting to get self-conscious about my conspicuous lack of graphical talent, maybe it's time to delve further into Fireworks' capabilities. Any suggestions (print or web) on where to start?

Hmm, how far to go with recommendations and forum guidelines.... (korkus2000, feel free to snip if necessary!):

• Obviously Fireworks newsgroup - resource via Google groups or news server. Good expert advice.
  
• Linda Rathgeber is a Macromedia Volunteer and wrote one of the best regarded books on Fireworks "Playing With Fire". It was written for Fireworks 4 but is still relevant for MX. She also more recently released a couple of e-books, as well as a useful commercial colour palette.
  
• There are some great extension developers. Check out Kleanthis Economou and Phireworx especially.
  
• As far as textures go, theOtherMatthew has some good free ones at the Fireworks Exchange on the Macromedia site.

You should find that sites and blogs related to the above people will give you enough to be going on with. Note that there are a lot of other authors and developers - I've just listed the ones where I have found the information or extensions extremely useful.

[limbo]

cEM

I,ve bought symbol fonts from Emigre, larabie and linotype. myfonts does 'picture' fonts that are pretty good too. I didn't buy them with backgrounds in mind, more for logo detailing but they'll have ones with pretty pattern-able symbols & borders.

A search for "buy symbol fonts" with turn up loads of sites, just browse till you find one with a well priced option(i found the free ones to be a little wishy-washy).

Cheers, Limbo

[stever]

Also, for backgrounds and textures, you may want to look at the main royalty-free photo sites (such as istockphoto) as some of them also offer other things, including vector graphics.

[createErrorMsg]

Wonderful. Thank you!