If you've been watching trends in web design closely in the last couple of years, you couldn't possibly ignore rise and shine of subtle patterns (as opposed to in-your-face heavy patterns from late 90s).

As a matter of fact, it's not just web design. The recent stable growth of mobile apps market also means that you might need this in mobile development, especially when you design graphics rich interfaces.

Either way, the trend was met by Subtle Patterns project, whose author produced nearly a hundred of CC BY Attribution 3.0 Unported licensed patterns. Just a couple of weeks ago Daniel Bolton repackaged the original patterns created for Photoshop as single PAT files for GIMP.

The full set consists of 88 patterns (out of original 96), here are just some of them:

To install them grab a ZIP archive from Github, unpack it and either copy PAT files to ~/.gimp-VERSION/patterns or add a path to them via Preferences dialog as explained in our guide on add-ons management in GIMP.

If you want to use them in Inkscape, open a pattern in GIMP as an image, use Ctrl+A to select all contents, Ctrl+C to copy to clipboard, then go to Inkscape and use Ctrl+V to paste. Finally use Object/Pattern/Objects to Pattern menu command (Alt+I) to make a pattern out of the selected bitmap that you pasted. The pattern will then show up in the list of patterns in the Fill and Stroke dialog.