If you're a web developer of a certain age, the URL subtlepatterns.com might hold a special place in your heart. It certainly does in mine.
Getting to mess around with its hundreds of chevrons and spirals and halfway open doors to fun but ultimately disastrous aesthetic choices wasn't just a way for my younger self to explore and mature a sense of design. It taught me a lot about the web and graphics in its own meager way. It's how I learned about tiling and SVG backgrounds and a whole host of other things aside.
It also showed me the value of texture in a literal sense. Aesthetic preferences are cyclical, but being able to pepper in a few skeuomorphic affordances here and there forced me to think hard about what the intent of some of my designs were, what elements I wanted to spotlight versus what ones I wanted to recede, and so on.
Mostly though, they were and are just fun and neat, which is the overriding reason why we have brought them, or at least a very small subset, to Buttondown. You can now add patterns to the background of your website. Go ahead, give it a spin:
You'll find it under Background in your Web settings if you're using the Modern theme. Pick one of eight patterns, then a background color and a pattern color. If you've turned on dark mode, you can set separate colors for it too.
Extra big thanks to Jim Raptis of Magic Pattern for inspiring many of these!
Enjoy yourself responsibly.