Web page backgrounds

Web page backgrounds used to be commonplace, but they became unpopular once
designers figured out that visitors to web pages didn’t want their eyes wrenched out by
gaudy tiled background patterns. With text being as hard to read onscreen as it is, it’s
adding insult to injury to inflict some nasty paisley mosaic background (or worse) on the
poor reader, too.
But, as affordable monitors continue to increase in size and resolution, designers face a
conundrum. If they’re creating a liquid design that stretches to fit the browser window,
text can become unreadable, because the eye finds it hard to scan text in wide columns.
And if they’re creating a fixed-width design, large areas of the screen often end up blank.
It’s for the latter design style that backgrounds can be useful, both in drawing the eye to
the content and providing some visual interest outside of the content area.
Like most things related to design, the use and style of backgrounds is subjective, but
some rules are worth bearing in mind. The most obvious is that a background should not
distract from your content. If you’re using background images, keep them simple, and
when you’re using color, ensure that the contrast and saturation with the page’s background
color is fairly low, but the contrast with the text content over the background is
very high. Also, unless you’re using a subtle watermark, it’s generally bad form to put complex
images underneath text (a soft gradient or simple geometric shape can sometimes be
OK, however)—the low resolution of the Web means it’s harder to read text than theprint-based equivalent, and you don’t want to make this even tougher! Also, because backgrounds
are typically ancillary content, they should not significantly increase the loading
time of the page.