Vintage style design is a trend that designers use to apply an old and classic sense to their designs. One way of applying this trend is by using vintage textures, vintage textures provides an easy to use method for creating stunning vintage style designs. In this article I compiled a list of 215 outstanding free vintage textures, but please check licenses before use.

1. Parchment Paper Texture

2. Straw Canvas

3. Old Photo Texture

4. Bloody

5. Concretely Lost

6. Coffee Stained Napkin

7. Vintage Khaki

8. Vintage Texture

9. Echo

10. Old photograph

11. Old Stitched Page

12. Vintage Paper Canvas

13. Brown Stucco Wall

14. Peeling Paint on Rusty Metal

15. Rust on Green Metal

16. Old Notebook Paper

17. Stained Paper Towel

18. Stained Memo Pad

19. T 22

20. keltainen verho

21. Vintage Coca-Cola on Brick

22. Vintage Texture

23. Grungy Stained Wood

24. Faded Green Paint on Concrete

25. Trunk Texture

26. lasipinta 188k

27. Gipsey Countess

28. Fancy

29. Indialon

30. Ueo!

31. suvi002

32. Old Lunchbox

33. Cake Box Texture

34. Very Old Hankie Box

35. Pieceof8- Old Paper

36. Dust Pan Texture

37. Conductors Secretary

38. Old Outside Trunk

39. Victorian Wallpaper

40. Cracked Wallpaper

41. Grunge Wallpaper 2

42. Vintage Wall Paper Texture

43. vintage diamonds

44. texture 4

45. Antique Script Texture

46. Art Nouveau Pattern Texture

47. Vintage Texture II

48. Beauty 95

49. Beauty 96

50. Use This 52

51. Grunge Wallpaper 1

52. Victorian grunge IV

53. vintage polka dot texture

54. Victorian grunge V

55. texture 2

56. Simple Vintage

57. +texture

58. Vintage Texture Pack (5 textures)

59. Vintage II Texture Pack (7 textures)

60. vintage grunge textures (5 textures)

61. Vintage

62. Package – Vintage Grunge – 2 (5 textures)

63. Vintage V Texture Pack (8 textures)

64. Vintage paper TEXTURE PACK (4 textures)

65. Vintage III Texture Pack (8 textures)

66. Vintage IV Texture Pack (9 textures)

67. Black Vintage

68. Vintage Textures Pk1 (15 textures)

69. vintage package 2 (5 textures)

70. Vintage Texture 01

71. vintage roses

72. Vintage Textures (13 textures)

73. Victorian grunge texture pack (5 textures)

74. Vintage Moss

75. Vintage Denim

76. Blue Vintage

77. vintage blue texture

78. Dark Vintage

79. Two vintage textures

80. Memories textures (2 textures)

81. Vintage Rust 2

82. Vintage Grunge Texture Pack (6 textures)

83. Vintage Rust

84. Vintage Valentine Paper (10 textures)

85. Vintage News Paper I

86. textures 6 (4 textures)

87. Old paper 3

88. Beauty 30

89. Ignite

90. Maps

91. Polka

92. TEXTURES 74

93. 6 vintage textures

94. I Remember Spring

95. Disturbed Skies

96. Textures 102

97. 280

98. Vintage Paper Scans 2 (6 textures)

99. turn back time texture pack (5 textures)

100. Stained Paper Textures I (12 textures)

Let us know if we have missed some thing awesome and we will be happy to update the article.

According to Wikipedia, a cognitive bias is:

the human tendency to make systematic errors in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence

There are certain things you can do as a web designer to make better decisions by recognizing and thinking twice about these cognitive biases. My attempt here will be to make you familiar some of these common decision mistakes and offer suggestions on how you can avoid them.

Before committing on something in the long run, do a premortem

Let’s suppose you’re planning to switch from freelancing to selling web design templates (so you’re changing your business model). After 3 months, you see that the new business model of selling templates doesn’t make you much money (which was your primary goal). Postmortem is the analysis you do after you’ve seen that your project failed (so you do the plan, see the results and analyze why it failed after you did the execution.)

Premortem is a powerful principle because it forces you to look into the future and assume that your plan has totally failed. So, for our example, suppose you’ve just finished planning your web design templates business model and you want to do a pre-mortem. What you need to do is imagine yourself 3 months in the future (it could be more, depending on how much time you plan to dedicate on the project) and imagining seeing that your plan was a total fiasco. Nothing worked. Why? Write down the reasons. Some of them could be:

• Not having enough money to get enough clients to make the whole business worthwhile
• Not many people interested in generic web design templates

and so on. You see the power of this? By focusing on why your project might fail you’re getting much more balanced view. So now you can do some more research and take factors like the size of the market (enough people interested in web design templates) etc.

You can do this type of premortem analysis for every medium or long-term project you do (premortem and the rest of the principles here aren’t required for all types of decisions, most decisions we do are without much risk & the choices are obvious). You can read more on premortem here.

Prove Yourself Wrong!

These are 2 mistakes we often do and pay a high price for it:

• Not considering enough alternatives when making a decision
• Making a decision based on very limited evidence

Making a Decision Based on Limited Evidence

In one experiment, the researchers gave people the choice of a number of treatments for a fictitious disease and told them the effectiveness of each treatment. Each option was combined with a positive, neutral or negative anecdote.

Let’s suppose a person named Anny was a part of that experiment. She was given a choice of a treatment with 90% effectiveness but was also told a story of a person who wasn’t part of that 90% of people for whom the treatment worked. How do you think would Anny respond?

Anny would be 39% likely to choose that treatment, as we can see from the pictures. An extremely good treatment with 1 negative experience decreased the chances people will choose that treatment by almost 300%. That’s the power of anecdotes.

The above study is an example of people making a decision based on very limited evidence. Another example I often see on web design blogs is people blindly copying themselves. Mashable, one of the most popular social media blogs, once introduced a feature called ‘Image sharing’, you could just drag an image and a box (see below) would appear suggesting you ’share’ that image on Twitter or Facebook:

After some time they removed the whole thing but still, many smaller blogs use that feature based on the rationalization: “If Mashable did it, then it must be good!” In reality, that was probably just a test they did and didn’t see any results from it.

What about web design blogs? I see a trend in web design blogs of producing extremely long posts (when it’s well known that people read at most 28% of the words on a page) instead of focusing on quality (it’s hard to measure the quality of a particular post, many factors need to be considered there so people often rely on the number of words as a measurement). There are some information quality theories which can offer a more objective picture of a quality of a content by taking into account several factors.

So the important lesson here is:

COLLECT ENOUGH DATA BEFORE YOU MAKE A DECISION. Want to test what’s the best way to monetize your site? Then run ads using 1 ad network for a week, then go for another one next week. Get enough large samples in order to make decent conclusions.

What about consulting with other people? As long as it’s people and not 1 person (the Mashable technical designer who introduced that social sharing feature or 1 anecdote), it’s fine. The wisdom of crowds is a powerful thing. Just make sure the “crowd” is DIVERSE and you hear as many different opinions as possible. Which leads me to my second point…

Not considering enough alternatives when making a decision

People love to surround themselves with people who have similar opinions/beliefs. The reasons are obvious: it’s a very comfortable position to be in, no negative emotions and conflicts are happening etc. Unfortunately, this is very detrimental for your decision-making process. I’ve mentioned previously that you want to make better decisions, consulting outside opinion is very helpful.

Consulting with outside similar opinion is not very helpful, however. This contributes to a phenomenon known as Groupthink which is the last thing you want to do if you want to get to an accurate decision.

What can you do here?

• Seek diversity

This can be hard to do initially. Look for opposite opinions from the people in your group. Here you’ll risking short-term comfort (emotionally) for a long-term benefit (a broader and more accurate view). In my experience, I often get very useful opposite opinions and become aware of things I previously overlooked when trying to make a specific decision.

For example, when you try to decide between 2 or 3 web design tools, look for the pros and cons of each. Many people often look for the advantages only not realizing that nothing is perfect and that by becoming aware of the limits a specific tool has, you can make your job easier by eventually finding additional tools that can fill that void.

• Look for ability

Of course, when consulting with people, look for people which file of expertise is relevant to your own. So if you want to find a good software, asking experienced people from review sites + web designers is a good idea.

How much skill (and how much luck)?

People are often inaccurate on saying  how much skill/luck is required in order to reach a particular outcome.

One good question to ask yourself to help you sort luck from skill is:

Can you lose on purpose?

Can you lose on purpose in roulette? Almost never. Roulette is 100% luck. What about poker? Well, yeah, you can lose on purpose but not always so it’s part skill, part luck.

I think it’s important for you, as a web designer, to distinguish luck from skill because you’ll be often predicting things (like if a client really likes the design you made etc) and need to have somewhat accurate view of the probability of the outcome happening.

Learn more:

Wikipedia has a great list of cognitive biases if you want to learn more about this topic. Hope you found this article to be useful.

Credits:

I got many of the principles here from a great book called Think Twice + some of my previous experience in reading psychology research.