Urban Dirty Blog

Photo download basket feature added

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:25:00 +0100

A new feature that has been added to the gallery photo pages. Now you can add photos to a ‘basket’ and download them all in one go as a zip file. Just like you were shopping for photos, but these are all free.

This makes bagging up a bunch of texture photos for your project even quicker and easier. For example, take a look at the bottom of this photo page.

How to use the download basket

When you are on a photo page, you’ll see a bar at the bottom of the screen like this:

If you want to put the photo you are looking at into the basket, click on ‘Add photo’, and you’ll see the a thumbnail of the photo appear in your basket. That photo will now stay in your basket until you either remove it, empty the basket or download the files.

Whilst browsing the gallery, your photos are not shown, in order to save space. Click on ‘Show / Hide’ to see the photos in your basket.

You can add up to 10 photos in one basket before you’ll be asked to download the photos. If you want more, simply download your files, then carry on browsing and you can fill your basket up again.

When you’re ready to download your photos, click on ‘Download (ZIP)’ and your photos will be processed and after a few seconds you’ll be asked to download a zip file, containing the photos that were in your basket.

Once you download your files, your basket will be emptied and ready to start again.

If you want to remove photos from the basket, click the ‘X Remove’ label underneath the thumbnail or you can empty the whole basket in one go by clicking ‘Empty’.

I hope you find this new feature useful and fun to use. It’s been in development for a while and I’m very pleased that it’s now part of the live site. If you have any comments, questions please send them over.

Go browse the gallery and pick your photos »

Urban spaces and dirty places

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:41:00 +0100

I live in a city called Brighton on the south coast of the UK. It is where most of the photos in the gallery come from and a great place to be if you’re hunting for textures to photograph.

Here is a small gallery, designed to show you a few spots where some of Urban Dirty’s photos come from, plus you give a small insight into a great environment for texture lovers.

New colour swatch generator

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0100

For a while now, The photos in the gallery have been accompanied by colour scheme suggestions, supplied by Adobe Kuler.This worked well but meant I had to manually tag the photos using machine tags in Flickr with whtaver colour first came into my head when looking at the image. Which, when uploading a large batch, became quite tedious and frustrating. EDIT: The colour schemes are now powered by the awesome Colourlovers!

But now… it is all automatic, thanks to a little bit of clever PHP code. So when you view photos such as this one, you’ll see the 10 most common colours from that photo extracted and listed out. And what’s more, you can also download an Adobe ACO swatch file of those colours to use in Photoshop.

Currently, the scheme suggestor takes the 5th (as in the ‘middle’) colour from the range and gets scheme suggestions based on that. It’s not ideal but is OK for now - it will however become something more jazzy whereby you click on a colour to get the scheme suggestions, which will be much more focused.

In fact, this new element to Urban Dirty has spawned another side project - which takes the colour schemeing a step further, take a peek at ColorSuckr, you might like it. I aim to get a few of the features from there over to this site very soon.

So I’m happy, you’re happy and we can get on with more textures…

Selection of photos on Advanced Photoshop CD

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:40:47 +0100

Issue 56 of Advanced Photoshop magazine packed 25 textures from Urban Dirty on the free CD, which got mentioned on the cover, bigged up on the CD itself and mentioned in a tutorial in the magazine.

Photos on Web Designer Magazine CD June 09

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:11:55 +0100

Readers of Web Designer magazine were once again treated to 25 photos from the gallery in Issue 157, on the free cd which got a mention on the cover and the ‘On the cd’ page.

25 texture photos in Dutch Web Designer magazine

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:41:33 +0100

Issue 16 of Web Designer magazine in Holland featured a selection of 25 photos from the gallery on their free CD for use in site designs and artwork.

'Crust n' Rust' G-Drive mini Skin

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:14:00 +0100

Following on from the series of Urban Dirty phone and iPod skins by Infectious, G-Technology now have a limited edition skin out for their portable storage drive - G-Drive mini.

The design is based on the Crust n’ Rust skin and stands alongside 2 other designs by Dalek and Shadow Chen and G-Technology are running a competition on Facebook to win a skinned G-DRIVE mini (for US residents).

Again, thanks to all at Infectious and high fives all round for the chaps at G-Technology.

Urban Dirty laptop, iPhone and iPod skins

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:22:00 +0000

Those wonderful people at Infectious have launched a range of skins for your laptop, iPod or iPhone based on photos from the gallery.

There are 4 designs to choose from, Crusts n’ rust, Grimey grill, Got it on lock & Greenery plus an interview with yours truly about how it all began, influences and vices.

I am so happy that these texture photos are getting used this way and it’s amazing to see them online alongside the likes of Jon Burgerman, Buff Monster and Stuntkid to name a few. I’m so grateful to the Infectious crew for showing such an interest. Hope you like the skins, they look pretty fresh huh?

Urban Dirty photos on Photoshop Creative CD

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:26:39 +0000

The Dutch issue of Photoshop Creative magazine for March 2009 (Issue 12) has 50 textures from the gallery on the free cd. That’s a lot of grimyness to muck about with! The magazine has a good texture based tutorial inside, so I hope Holland has some fun with them.

Betty Boop and burnt buildings

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:31:00 +0000

Whilst striding through Brighton the other day, I spotted this building down a side street. Initially it was the Betty Boop in the window that caught my eye, but then I saw that the doorway of the place seemed to have suffered quite a bit of damage from a fire.

Not good news for anyone, however what had come out of that was an abundance of amazing textures created from bubbling paint, charred wood and crusted outer wall. Be sure to check out the photos from the building in the gallery, but here are a few favourites:

» See all the photos from this spot in the gallery

Desktops, brush and photo pack downloads

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:59:00 +0000

There has been a downloads section added to the site. It’s an area I have been meaning to add for a while but only recently got round to finishing.

You’ll find 3 desktop wallpapers for your computer and also sizes for your phone, so you can stay grimey wherever you go:

In additon, you’ll find a pack of 25 of the best, handpicked photos from the gallery and a set of 8 hi-res photoshop brushes to rough up your artwork. I intend to add to and update this section so there’ll be more in the not-too-distant future.

» Visit Urban Dirty downloads

Advanced Photoshop Magazine - France

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:13:00 +0000

Issue 9 (February 2009) of Advanced Photoshop Magazine in France is packing 50 Urban Dirty textures on their free CD, alongside 25 free stock photos from Photogen. This fact even gets bigged up in a blue bubble on the cover.

Gallery photo previews

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:04:00 +0000

The gallery now has a preview pop up when you rollover a thumbnail. This feature has been added so that you don’t have to click through to the photo page every time you want to see the full texture, thus speeding up your image browsing. In addition, click a thumbnail now takes you to the small photo size page.

» Try it out now in the gallery

Advanced Photoshop Magazine CDs

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:06:33 +0000

Over the past couple of months, photos from Urban Dirty have been popping up in magazines in France and Holland.

Following on from that, 25 texture photos from Urban Dirty were included on the CD in issue 13 of Advanced Photoshop Magazine in Holland. International grimy love.

Prior to this, 50 photos were included on the CDs in the Dutch and French versions of Advanced Photoshop Magazine in December 2008. Big thanks to the crew at Imagine Publishing for including my stuff once again!

The Texture Tanker

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 15:22:00 +0000

This strange old tanker trailer thing had been parked up by this car and tyre garage in Brighton for about a year, but it wasn’t until last week that I got round to getting some photos from it. It has some gorgeous textures incorporating rust, blistered & peeling paint and the remains of what must have once been a fairly smart design incorporating a touch of typography.

Such is the wonder of this beast that it also attracted the attention of street artist Hop Louie:

» I got a few photos but intend to go back for more asap.

Ofiicial Urban Dirty Wordpress theme - Dirtpress

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:17:00 +0000

I often use Wordpress as a framework to build websites on. Due to its versatility, it allows you to create custom designs or themes. I have created a Wordpress theme based on Urban Dirty, aptly titled ’Dirtpress’.

Here is a screenshot of the homepage:

Whilst it may look quite heavy on the graphics, the theme itself uses only 4 images and is really quite simple under the hood. It has a few nifty features like highlighting the latest post and a transparent background image, but largely remains a very basic offering - which was the main idea.

Whilst many themes offer photoshop files and javascript libraries included in the download, I wanted people to be able to download Dirtpress and have it up, running and customised in a few clicks with no need for any other software or scripts.

Because of its simple nature, it’s also good for those who would like to build on it or who are new to Wordpress development.

I am very pleased with how it came out, and have a few more planned that follow a different design path.

The Dirtpress theme for Wordpress is available to download at Theme Forest.

Urban Dirty on Web Designer Magazine CD

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Urban Dirty made another appearance on Web Designer Magazine’s free CD. Last month, 25 photos came free with the magazine to help photoshoppers and website be-boppers get some gritty grime in their style.

Urban Dirty textures in 'Advanced Web' magazine

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

The first issue of Advanced Web magazine came out in France last month, covering many aspects of working on the web from Photoshop art through to Ajax coding. To make it even more of a treat there were 80 photos from Urban Dirty included on the magazine’s CD.

Advanced Photoshop Magazine - Urban Dirty textures on CD - September 2008

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Issue 48 of Advanced Photoshop Magazine has 50 photos from Urban Dirty on the included CD to complement the urban/worn effect design tutorial inside.

Web Designer Magazine - Dutch edition, Urban Dirty textures on CD - August 2008

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Issue 8 of the Dutch version of Web Designer Magazine has included 80 texture images from my Urban Dirty website on their free CD. The images are also used in a photo manipulation tutorial within the magazine.