Meaningless Backgrounds

Originally I had this link point to a web page with truly horrible use of background patterns. However, I ended up deciding that it would be unfair to single out one specific author for a design sin committed by many people who were overly eager to jump on a new bandwagon before its implications were understood.

Thus, I have created my own bad page instead. Isn't it fun!

So far, I have found a single site that made appropriate use of background patterns: The Sci-Fi Channel uses various planetary backgrounds to quickly situate the user and communicate "science-fictionness" without hurting the readability of the information itself.

This page is "optimized" for Netscape 1.1 or later

The design of this page can only be seen in its true horror in browsers
that support the Netscape BACKGROUND attribute for the <BODY> tag.

This example is from Sun design guy Jakob Nielsen's "The Alert Box".