First off, if you are expecting some musings of old folks and their leg troubles, sorry, not what I had in mind. But since you are here, you might as well keep reading, or click on one of those ads on the right…
My thought today is directed at the ever changing world of design. What was cool 20 years ago was not cool 10 years ago and is starting to become cool again. My case in point is wallpaper. If you want to be ahead of the trend go ahead and start wrapping your walls in all their papered bliss. Maybe not you say? Take a look at web design today. I find it fascinating that trends on the web seems to mirror trends in life just at an extremely elevated pace. In our example of wallpaper, it was all the rage when people started figuring out that you could place graphics on web pages. In fact it got to be pretty ugly and it was a rare site you saw that knew how to use wallpaper or a graphical background correctly. Most of the time it was an offense to the eyes. That seemed to fall off and solid color or 2 or 3 colored backgrounds became the dominant force. But now, I am seeing on a lot of contemporary sites (developers and designers that have a voice in the community) the trend back to a graphical background. This time however, they are very subdued and classical. It is interesting how this very renaissance look can be so modern.

I think what I like about it so much is the fact that it is subtle enough not to overpower the content on the page, yet is intriguing enough to warrant a deeper look. I think the word “intrigue” probably describes it best. You will notice that in my efforts to “be with it” I also have this type of background for my pages. I have done quite a bit of searching for these specific types of backgrounds and have found very little. Most of the stuff along the same lines is very cheesy and doesn’t convey that specific sophisticated classical look. I did find one website that has quite a few of these. Here is the link. If you follow the link you need to scroll a little bit. The patterns in the examples on this page are great but you would still need to take the opacity down quite a bit in order for them to not overpower the content on the page.

So, if you are looking to lead the way, contact your nearest wallpaper store and have them print you some of those.