Gradient Tile Maker Version 1, April 2002

The Gradient Tile Maker is one of those little utilities that are hard to find when you need it. With it you can make horizontal or vertical narrow gradient bitmaps, which you can use later in web pages or in programs.

Tiles are small bitmaps (pictures) that are designed in such a way that if they are put next to each other, and below each other, they will create a seemingly continuous pattern without breaks between the constituent pictures.The tiles you make with this program are narrow strips, although larger squares are possible too.

Gradients are softly shaded colours that blend into each other, like most things in nature do, with shading. Using gradient tiles in programs and web pages make the page look "alive" instead of "flat". The more subtle the colour changes, the more natural it looks. For example, the Tools window in the screenshot below contains a vertical gradient from light grey at the top to slightly darker grey at the bottom.This makes the Tools window look "lit up", as if the sun is shining on a solid steel surface from above. It also makes the Tools window look slightly curved or bulging in the middle.

The Gradient Tile Maker is very simple to use - the screenshot shows all there is to it. The gradient doesn't look perfect on this web page, but that is because the picture of this screen shot here is a JPG compressed picture of low quality. In practice the gradients are perfect.

With the Gradient Tile Maker you can make single gradients that are supposed to stretch across the entire screen (horizontally or vertically), but also smaller gradients that tile properly (the end colour is the same as the start colour). If you need more complicated tiles, you can match start or end colours of tiles when you make them, and simply copy and paste them in a drawing program such as Paint Shop Pro to link them together.!

The program is freeware.
Download the Gradient Tile Maker (1.5 Mb).
Includes complete installation program.

Samples
Here are some samples which you can download simply by right-clicking on the picture and selecting Save As.... They are compressed horizontally for display but are 1024 or 1200 pixels wide. They are JPG files (compressed again, but of very high quality). To get the ultimate quality, download the Gradient Tile Maker and make these yourself!
 

Steel

Air

Fire

Water

Desert

Earth

Moss

Sky