I'm Dot Prettyman. By day I'm a production artist at a small design studio in Philadelphia: I make other people's brochures print without anything going wrong. By night I print black-and-white photographs in a bathroom I have turned into a darkroom, and in between I make background tiles, because nobody else seems to be making ones that actually tile.

You've seen them. The marble with the hard line every 100 pixels. The clouds that end in a neat vertical edge and start over. The brick wall where every eighth row is a different height. A background tile has exactly one job, which is to disappear into itself, and most of them are out there doing a different job, which is showing you where their edges are.

Every tile in this library was drawn to wrap: whatever leaves off the right edge comes back in on the left, and the same top to bottom. Each one has been tested at three by three and squinted at from across the room. If you find a seam in any of them, write me and I'll fix it and put your name on the page.

1. Free for personal home pages. Your family page, your club, your band, your dog. If the page sells something, e-mail me first. I usually say yes to small businesses and church groups; I just like to know.

2. Put a credit line at the bottom of the page that uses the tile: "Background from Tilework", linked here. Small type is fine. I'm not proud.

3. Keep a copy in your own space. Save the tile and upload it with the rest of your files. Please don't point your page at my copy. It's rude, it costs me bandwidth, and your page will break the day I rename something.

4. No repackaging. Don't put my tiles in a "free backgrounds" collection, a zip file or a CD-ROM.

5. Recolor all you like. Shifting the hue or brightness won't break the seam. Cropping or cutting a piece out of a tile will break it every time, so don't.

Every tile in here is busy. That's the point of a pattern. It also means you cannot put a paragraph straight on top of one and expect anybody to read it. Put your words in a table with a solid bgcolor and let the pattern frame it. Every swatch in the library shows you how.

And always give the body a bgcolor close to the tile's average color. The tile takes a moment to arrive over a modem, and without it your visitors get a flash of glaring white, or worse, white text on white. I've listed a matching color with every tile.

People ask, so: I paint the pattern in Photoshop a little bigger than I want it. I crop it to size. Then I use Filter, Other, Offset, and shift it by exactly half its width and half its height with Wrap Around turned on. That drags the four outside edges into a cross in the middle of the square, where I can see them. I paint out the cross with the rubber stamp tool, then offset it back. Then I tile it three by three in a scratch file and go make coffee, because you only see seams with fresh eyes.

Last step is the one people skip: reducing the colors. A tile gets downloaded once and then repeated, so it doesn't have to be tiny, but a 40K background is still rude on a 28.8. Everything here is under 4.5K.