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Transparenttextures.com

transparenttextures.com

312 pointssurprisetalk40 comments

It's extremely weird to see this site on HN! I built this site in 2014 -- and haven't touched it since. I wasn't a developer then, I was a product manager, and this was a "look, hiring managers, I can build things" side project (it worked, I've been a dev since 2016).

Despite being about 40% broken I keep the site up because it's still reasonably functional and there are a surprising amount of sites that now depend on having hotlinked the patterns directly from this domain. If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down. Until then, it's a fun relic from the internet of a decade ago.

Just to answer a question upthread (and I 100% agree this should be on the website), the patterns are all CC-BY-3.0, meaning it just requires attribution and any pattern can be used for free.

> If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down.

If you do shut it down, and safety is a concern, I would keep the domain going for a while with an “it is all gone…” message, otherwise as soon as it expires it'll be replaced by something less safe. Usually this will be a standard “domain for sale” page with a pile of trackers, but as this domain has hit the front page of HN today I expect several bots have just scraped the content so if they get the domain they can shove it back up with ads & trackers.

Or if you want it to survive but don't have time to clean up the rot, maybe do as someone else suggested and put in on GitHub, so others can fork & fix it, and replace the site at the current domain with a link to that so anyone following a link to the current domain can find the remnants and any forks. And if a particularly well maintained fork does turn up, perhaps link directly to that too.

Or, with all those hotlinked PNGs, just imagine the next time there's a zero-day vulnerability in browser image rendering...

Could the whole thing be open sourced and moved to Github pages so it can be forked and maintained? This is an amazing resource on par with the defunct Webtreats.etc that was never properly archived as far as I know outside of Wayback(Kinda).

I could even see this whole thing just being packaged into finished projects, to allow user or admin-selectable themes, especially with the new CSS features.

Assuming the CC-BY requirements are met using just the data that's available, this still has a lot of potential.

> If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down.

To avoid the problem of linked domains leading to malware or things like that, you might consider linking to archived snapshots on Wayback Machine of the links instead of the real pages, for those sites that are now no longer hosting what they used to.

Please don't ever treat archive.org as a free CDN, they are a public library in need of your support, not free hosting for your side-project. There are enough free resources (e.g. Github Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare...) that are better suited for this task.

They're talking about link rot, not hosting for the website itself.

Exactly.

I think I actually meant to reply to dreadlordbone's comment, where they implied image hotlinking - "it loads slower" because archive.org is not a CDN.

i bet those load times would be very bad

Well that'd be ok. We are talking about the a href text links, not about hot-linking the images themselves.

That's awesome, I used your project dozens of times, it was always my first stop whenever I needed some funk for a project page. Thanks so much!

I remember using this back then for fun projects. So cool to see it again here and your comment! Thanks for the site!

Good fun, please add wallpapers up to 4K!

Nice work!

I can't seem to find licensing info on the textures. Where can I use them legally?

The author just commented [0] to mention everything is CC-BY-3.0.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515968

I think this website has been around long enough it probably comes from the ‘everything on the internet is free’ era.

Sadly, today that often interprets to: someone bought (or just claims to have) the rights and now makes a living suing people for using it. If you plan to use it for anything serious, it's worth the effort to find something with an actual license.

A transparent noise texture plus css blur on the background makes a really nice frosted glass effect.

By any chance are you able to point to any examples ..this sounds interesting and I may want to use this technique in my next project. Thanks.

I don't have it online, but I used that effect for modal dialog background overlays: https://github.com/geon/estimator/blob/369824b8b22e5c9c238c8...

It's pretty much like the second method here: https://dev.to/khush2706/frosted-glass-effect-in-css-27p4 , but instead of just `rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.192)` as background, also use the noise image from my repo.

Oh wow, I'm really glad your side project has given people so much value over these years! Deep inside, I feel like stuff like this is what the Internet was really for.

A lot of the attribution links on this site lead to shady domain squatting sites, or sites that appear to be hosting malware.

Wow, I remember using this 10 years ago.

This is cool! I’d be interested in seeing how much of this could be accomplished with svg or raw css

There's lots of good ones at https://css-pattern.com/

This is great, thanks!

Just an observation, some colors completely wash out before others. Like 00d000 is solid green, but 0000d0 is a nicely shaded blue for many patterns. But depends on pattern (looking at bright squares).

I wonder how they look with a gradient background

Here's what that list of transparent textures looks like on a gradient background:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240912000631/https://jade-deni... (slower to load, but better to view on a big monitor.)

https://archive.is/tvcvt (faster to load, but not full width.)

I threw it together quickly. So some of the patterns may be a bit difficult to judge when seen using the size of the preview boxes in my grid. But some of them look surprisingly good on this particular gradient and preview size. Also, this little page with the gradient background is best viewed on desktop rather than mobile.

Unlike the original Transparent Textures website this page does not give you any tools to play around with background, and unlike the original site does not let you click the individual patterns to swap the background. That's intentional – I only wanted to quickly see what the patterns looked like on a gradient background. Not to step on the toes of the creator of the website.

Reminds me of the old subtlepatterns dot com

Would have totally used these back in the Tripod hosting days of the 90s. Cool.

'Transparent' how?

I had the same question at first. Upon downloading and inspecting the PNG file, you will notice that it actually has an alpha channel. This allows us to give it any color we want easily by giving a background color property in CSS. That could still be achieved however, if it wasn't transparent, by playing with the Hue value.

Cool, but how do you create your own patterns? I was hoping for an editor that let me create my own.

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