Is Wood The New White?
A lot of designers (myself included) love white space. Does this mean from now on we’ll have to make good use of “wood space”? 
Anyway, here are some (there are probably a lot more) blog designs that use a wooden background. You may have seen them already in one or two CSS galleries. I just thought it would be interesting to try a visual comparison. Here goes:
Alex Buga – Alex is a fellow Romanian designer and I suspect he’s the one who started this trend (at least for blogs). He does quality work and the sites he designed are featured in all major CSS galleries.
Cristian Neagu – Cristian is also a Romanian designer, who’s site was recently featured in Best Web Gallery.
As you can see, I use a wooden texture myself, but only for the blog header. I used to like the contrast between the background and the pictures from my flickr feed (I had some thumbs up there in a previous version). I don’t like the whole darkness thing anymore and plan to switch to something light. That’s why I never get any thing done, cause I change my mind a lot, when it comes to designing my website. 
Anyway… for those of you still digging the whole wooden texture thing, here’s a great tutorial on how to build one in Photoshop.
LATER UPDATE: Hey, I’m not the only one to notice this trend. Noupe has a list of 22 designs using that piece of wood. Just found out via their RSS feed.
LATER UPDATE 2: Make that 23, cause they’ve been kind enough to add my site to the list. 
