Jonathon Wisnoski: Wallpaper

Because I often spend long periods of time in front of a computer I have a great interest is what my screen looks like and one of the easiest to customize aspects of any computer is the desktop. And it is in this area that I also think that most people have got it all wrong (not that it cannot be said that it is a matter of taste).

A proper wallpaper should be very simple and should be comprised of the least amount of shapes/pixels and colours as possible; Because busying up your computer screen is only going to make staring at it all the more stressful and hard on your ability to concentrate. Wallpaper, in my opinion, should also be as dark as possible as light causes strain on your eyes, but depending on the person and how much you are on the computer this is less of a issue.

And all of this seems to be in direct opposition to most wallpaper. Pretty much every mainstream game gets official wallpaper, and for everyone of them you are lucky to find anything simple. Instead you get detailed, forceful, and yes beautiful artwork, but not something I would want to stare at for long periods of time.

A note on how to get wallpaper like I am describing. For the most part what I use as wallpaper is not available on any wallpaper site nor will you find any of it is you google wallpaper because it is simply too low resolution to be considered wallpaper. The best way I have found is simply searching for images of things I like. But then some editing is sometimes required; For one I like things to be primarily black, so I might replace the background of a image with the colour black, which sometimes is easier said then done as image compression and edge blurring can mean that a background of white is actuality many different shades of white that most image editors cannot handle. So what I do most of the time, and it will work with most low colour pictures with a white background, is a colour inversion, which is easily done using any of the Microsoft paint programs that come with windows (among others).

Note: Images that are below your screen resolution should not be stretched to fit, having empty space looks great to me (as long as it is the same colour as the image background).

Quote, the protagonist from Cave Story (mini-review)