Amazing backgrounds and textures are the unspoken heroes of graphic design—adding depth, interest and detail to layouts, they’ll be the hardest-working images in your collection. 

In this article, you'll find ten essential backgrounds and textures to download once and cherish forever.  

From cool grunge styles to gritty concretes and starry nebulas, here you'll find a background or texture style to suit almost every sort of design, from website projects to magazine layouts.

Looking for a wider selection of backgrounds and textures? Discover a huge range of pro-quality texture and background images over on Envato Elements and Envato Market.

Read on to discover the best graphic design backgrounds and textures that will play an indispensable role in your everyday design process...

1. The Concrete Background Texture

Looking to give your designs an instant cool edge? Concrete textures can look grungy and distressed, or minimal and urban—take your pick from this selection of concrete backgrounds to find the perfect partner for your designs. They come in different backgrounds and effects for unique takes on concrete.

Concrete is an on-trend material across the board right now—in interior and product design, as well as graphics—so it makes a great addition to designs that need to look contemporary and aspirational. 

Designing a website for a new retail brand? Putting together a promo flyer for a design event? Consider integrating a concrete texture* into your artwork, and make your media seem on-trend in an instant. The material makes for some of the best graphic design backgrounds.

Check out this vector background design pack for example. This pack comes with 40 background textures featuring concrete, stone, and so much more. Add some grit to your designs with a few simple clicks.

* Top Tip: Concrete can appear cold in the wrong context—warm up your design by pairing the texture with a warmer metallic tone, like copper.

2. The Space Background Texture

We all wanted to be an astronaut at some point in our childhood (or, indeed, adulthood), but you can bring a touch of celestial wonder to your designs without leaving Earth. All you need is an amazing design background.

Scenic space backgrounds might not be the plainest of good backgrounds, but they're surprisingly versatile. These trendy backgrounds look fantastic layered behind poster artwork, and can help to create a more immersive online experience when placed as a background skin on a homepage.

Space backgrounds have an instant psychological effect on the viewer—they can inspire feelings of adventure and intellectualism (perfect for science media or business pitch documents), but they can also be calming and spiritual. Their stunning beauty requires only simple typography in the foreground to make them shine. 

Check out this selection of the best graphic design backgrounds set in space, which has a huge range of different color tones to suit any project. Add these types of backgrounds to your posters or websites for a sublime space effect.

3. The Grunge Background Texture

Grungy types of backgrounds and grunge textures will never go out of style—they always give a cool, edgy look to designs. Look for peeled paint textures, faded edges, and gritty color schemes. 

Grunge backgrounds and textures look great because they contain so much detail and visual interest. They're versatile too—try layering a grungy cool texture background under photos and setting the opacity to multiply to bring through some of that interesting texture and give your images an aged, vintage-style effect.

Try adding a creative grunge background design to a festival flyer, a gig poster, or a magazine cover to add depth and interest. These unique grunge backgrounds will also look fantastic placed in games and apps, bringing a more immersive quality to digital designs.

Enjoy a premium selection of 12 awesome painted backgrounds featuring beautiful colors and more. Created with a variety of tools, this set has high-resolution backgrounds you'll definitely want to add to your collection. 

4. The Polygon Background Texture

Polygons might not seem like the most exciting building block for graphic backgrounds, but the final effect is incredibly versatile and professional-looking. It's why they make for such cool designs for backgrounds.

Polygon textures have a tech-forward style that suits corporate media, like reports, business websites, or expo displays. 

They're a great way to add polished texture quickly, which is a great timesaver for corporate pitches. They also have a very modern, even futuristic quality that helps businesses to look forward-thinking.

If you’re looking to add texture to apps, polygon designs are perfectly suited for the job—they’re stylish without being obtrusive, and they balance flat and 3D styles to keep your designs looking on-trend.

You can adapt polygon textures easily to different color schemes too. Take a look at the beautiful selection of colors in this polygon backgrounds package if you need an amazing design background. 

This pack contains ten noisy polygon backgrounds with incredible colors and textures. Use the abstract shapes to complement your next project.

5. The Blackboard Background Texture

Different blackboard backgrounds will be a real workhorse for your design projects. Set behind simple or cursive typography, they’re great for emphasizing points in sales pitches, on educational materials, or on motivational posters or flyers.

Team a blackboard texture with a handwritten or, even better, chalkboard typeface for the ultimate back-to-school pairing. This will work just as well on college lecture slides as it will for advertising early fall sales with a back-to-school theme.

Awesome blackboard backgrounds don’t need to be black either! Liven up a conventional blackboard texture with chalky, muted shades, as in this blackboard image collection.

Or dress up your designs with blackboard backgrounds in different grey shades. This pack contains nine different blackboard backgrounds at 300 dpi. Make any clean design pop with these incredible graphics. 

6. The Watercolor Background Texture

Want to add a painterly, artistic touch to your designs? Watercolor backgrounds and painterly textures are perfect for bringing a craft-inspired look to your designs, without needing to pick up a paintbrush. 

Watercolor textures aren’t just suited to advertising art sales or craft fairs—because they represent something that's hand-crafted, they're perfectly suited to branding and packaging for organic products or independent businesses. 

Try integrating these cool designs for backgrounds into cosmetics or jewellery box designs to add a home-made, authentic touch to packaging designs.

Watercolor textures can bring a very different character to your layouts when set in different colorways. In this watercolor texture collection, a clear turquoise blue has a summer holiday vibe (great for hotel flyers or websites); a bright red has a bold graffiti feel, and an olive green, navy blue, and black blend has a natural style, which would also swing towards a grungy look if darkened.

This watercolor texture pack contains ten high-quality backgrounds with gorgeous colors. Use these cool designs for backgrounds to add beautiful texture to your posters or stationery.

7. The Bokeh Background Texture

Bokeh backgrounds and abstract light textures are made up of diffused light pixels to create an ethereal effect. These trendy backgrounds can add a dreamy, idealistic quality to your designs. 

Suited to all sorts of media, bokeh textures are great for softening layouts, helping to add a beautiful, soft-focus style to websites, magazines, book covers—you name it. 

Bokeh backgrounds are also perfect for fashion catalogues, wedding stationery, or simply showcasing beautiful photos or typography.

Keep a collection of bokeh backgrounds on hand for when a client wants to tone down a design or make it appear more soft and calming. This bokeh backgrounds pack features ten high-resolution images perfect for any website or app. 

8. The Paper Background Texture

I personally find paper backgrounds to be one of the most versatile and heavily used texture styles in my own work, and I'm building quite the collection as a result. 

These good backgrounds add subtle texture to posters, flyers, stationery, and web pages. 

For vintage-inspired and flat-style designs, a paper background is indispensable—see your designs magically transform from crisp and contemporary to suitably aged in an instant. 

Even if you’re intending to print your items on paper or card, adding a ‘fake’ paper background will only add to the tactile feel of your finished item. It’s also a great trick for making a printed item feel more luxurious if your budget won’t stretch to printing on expensive paper.

This collection of wrinkled backgrounds includes an interesting texture that will add a cool grunge element to your designs. 

Enjoy ten high-quality images, all at 3000x2000 pixels, to make the most of your designs. Download this set of versatile paper textures today!

9. The Brick Background Texture

Bricks are a fantastic texture to have to hand, ideal for placing behind mocked-up framed images, or for sitting behind graffiti-style typography.

Brick backgrounds provide enough interest to be the main visual feature of a layout, while remaining uniform enough to allow text to stand out. 

They can have a worn, grungy look, or a clean, red-brick style, making them suitable for a range of projects and styles. Brick also makes for cool art backgrounds.

This broad range of brick textures has styles to suit every taste, from clean burnt terracotta to distressed painted walls. Download 20 different textures for the perfect brick background for your designs. Also included is a quick vignette layer for a dramatic effect.

10. The White Background Texture

Likely to be the most versatile of all the backgrounds in your collection, a basic range of cool white backgrounds and textures will no doubt become a firm favorite for use in your design projects.

While cool white backgrounds lack in color, they're infinitely adaptable as a result and are an instant hack for giving print designs a polished look. 

Layered behind or over graphics, typography and other textures on posters, stationery, websites, cards, and covers, they give an instant ‘texture-boost’ to layouts.

This collection of white abstract textures contains ten hi-res cool white backgrounds with design and bokeh and glittered effects. Add some subtle sparkle to your work by trying this pack of stylish white textures today. Watch them quickly become the most used cool white backgrounds in your collection.

Your Ultimate Background and Texture Collection

Awesome backgrounds and textures are the backbone of any great design layout, adding subtle detail, depth, and color, while allowing the main elements to shine. 

This collection of ten cool graphic backgrounds will see you through any design project, whatever the theme and whoever the client:

1. The concrete background


2. The space background


3. The grunge background


4. The polygon background


5. The blackboard background


6. The watercolor background


7. The bokeh background


8. The paper background


9. The brick background


10. And don’t forget... the white background
    

With this unbeatable team of textures and cool designs for backgrounds at hand, you'll be able to take your future creative projects to the next level in an instant.

Even More Amazing Backgrounds From Envato Elements

But why stop there? There are thousands of amazing, trendy backgrounds and textures on Envato Elements, so here are ten more bonus options for your personal collection.

Lines | Abstract Wavy Backgrounds | Vol. 03 (JPG)

The abstract design of Lines makes for some awesome backgrounds. This pack includes nearly 70 graphic backgrounds you can use for a wide range of projects. Make wallpapers, social media ads, or website headers.

Sky Textures x10 vol2 (JPG)

If you like to live with your head in the clouds, get some good backgrounds to match. Sky includes ten different professional background textures that are artfully crafted. Place your logo over these high-res design background images or use them for social media posts.

Showcase Backgrounds (JPG)

The best use for the awesome backgrounds of Showcase is right in the title. This pack of cool graphic backgrounds can be used for a logo reveal or a product mockup. If you need a white background with design, try out Showcase.

100 Rock Photo Textures (JPG)

Rocks can make for a cool texture background, as seen in this Envato Elements item. This bundle of professional background textures includes 100 JPG files for you to use. Each of them provides a realistic and appealing rock texture.

Micro Grids (JPG)

If you're looking for the perfect creative background design for fabric prints, banners, invitations, and more, Micro Grids is your choice. The pattern is interesting and can fit with many creative styles. It's one of the best graphic design backgrounds online.

Speckle Paint Textures (JPG, PDF)

The detail that went into making Speckle Paint Textures make it such an awesome graphic design background. It's actually made from real paint speckles and spatters! Zoom in and see the little paint drips that make up this cool texture background.

Colorscapes Lite (PNG)

Colorscapes Lite makes cool art backgrounds out of striking visuals. This pack includes 12 design background images that can be applied almost everywhere. If you need a creative background design for stationery or giftwrap, you'll like Colorscapes Lite.

Smooth Flow Backgrounds (JPG)

While the last featured creative background design grabbed attention with jagged edges, this one does it with a Smooth Flow. It mirrors lines seen in nature creatively. This set of cool graphic backgrounds is perfect for hi-res wallpapers and other graphic design projects.

A1 Halftone Textures (PNG, TIFF, PDF)

Halftones always make for an amazing design background, and A1 is no exception. These 25 professional background textures are high-res and high in detail. You can use them for overlays or noise and screen effects.

Colourful 3D Abstract Rings Background (JPG)

We round out our list with these wonderful, trendy backgrounds. With abstract ring shapes, this graphic design background pack has ten different options for your creative projects. Try out these awesome backgrounds for your next poster or Instagram ad design!

Dive Into the World Of Graphics With Envato Tuts+

If you’re still on the hunt for cool art backgrounds or professional background textures, be sure to swing by Envato Market and Envato Elements and check out the huge range of great-value textures there.

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