Pimp My Desktop!
Lesson One: Wallpapers
The easiest thing to teach. There are a lot of great and wonderful wallpapers out there for anyone’s use, however being the picky bastard I am, 75% of them suck. Personally, with relation to anime ones, there are a lot of horrible wallpapers out there with the really good ones only making up 30% of the total avaliable. Yes I personally believe the majority of anime wallpapers are pretty bad; usually just some quick photoshop effects put together with little to no creativity behind the design. Or even worse, great design but the source material is horrible (i.e. clean up scanning).
Honestly if one’s going to design and make an wallpaper to show to the public, for the love of all that is good please take your time in designing. I’ve rather see an wallpaper that took 1239 hours to make come out great than one that only took a few hours come out bad. Also if one can’t design a good quality wallpaper for the life of them but continues to do so, please stop! I understand your love for the subject at hand, but let more talented people do the work! I don’t need to see an wallpaper that looks like something a five year old made, unless it was actually done by a five year old.
Another thing I’d like to mention to all those potential wallers out there, please think of resolution sizes other than your own! A lot of the time I’ll find a kick arse wallpaper I’d like to use only to be disappointed the size is too small. If you’re going to create an wallpaper, do so at 1600×1200 or higher. At least this way it can easily be resized to smaller resolution; unless of course your source material scan quality isn’t that high nor good. Only then can I admit it’s okay to do an wallpaper at a certain resolution size.
Enough preaching, the best three places I can recommend to get general and anime related wallpapers have to be deviantART, animepaper, and minitokyo. It’s as simple as that.
Let me add, however, some other great anime wallpaper sites I constantly check out:
- A N G E L – S O U P
- Abstract Anime
- banime
- Desktop Anime
- digiTalBoing
- Mercurial Design .NET
- ningen
- Paroxysm AE
- Peorth – Wallpapers by Andrea
- Virtual Ecosystem EX
Wallpaper Changers
I actually don’t use them considering how picky I get about wallpapers. I have, however, had the chance to check out at least two wallpaper changer programs if you were in the market for one. Best of all, they’re free. QuickChanger is a pretty straight forward program, plus you can skin the program itself to help match the rest of your desktop. The other changer I’ve tried, is Avedesk Desktop Picture Docklet which I’ll get into a bit more in a later lesson. I’d recommend the first program just because it’s a lot easier to use and configure compared to Avedesk and its docklets.
If you have a worthy wallpaper site or related program you think I should list, please feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment. I’ll usually respond back within the same day if not sooner. If the site or program is worth anything in my opinion, I’ll gladly add it to my tutorial and give credit to you for telling me about it!
Great tutorial, Alex. Five Stars(or was it 2 thumbs xx;) Anyway, thankies for finally making the tutorial.
Wow this is wonderful, thanks for making this!
To answer this question, no the visual style/themes do not change your cursor. However, some VS do come with cursors to match the windows skin. Just double check the VS files to see if any cursors were included. Same can be said with icons for the theme too.
As for Aqua looking themes, I don’t use them. There are like a ton of OSX looking ones in deviantART so browse around and try them out.
I can recommend some VS that are my personal favs though. Anything by b0se is always good. Other than that, agroove, areao4, exeed, roguesi, and shaded are all great VS to check out.
Yeah, thanks a bunch for sharing this.
I have another suggestion for your desktop addons/widgets programs. I have in the past tried out a program called Konfabulator which used to be just for Mac. But a few months ago they released a Windows version.
I just looked at Konfabulator’s site and it appears that it is the same as the Yahoo! widgets that you linked to.
Nice bit of information you have. Just wanted to add a nice site for icons that I use.
oh, the HTML didn’t work. Sorry for the 2 posts. But the site is http://www.pixelgirlpresents.com
wow….I was trying to figure out how to do this myself after looking at your screens, but this helps alot. =) thanks for all your previous help and for this resource =)
I use WindowsBlinds because it has nicer skins, but its not free.
Also, i use “Wallpaper Changer” which is a free mircosoft powertool downloadable from here somewhere. You set a directory, and it changes your wallpaper every 15 or xx minutes to the next image in the folder. its wonderful
Hey moy, what theme is that you’re using in the screenshots for the Visual Styles section? I have area04 by =heylove over at DeviantArt, but it looks slightly different (and incomplete), I like your version much better. Where did you get it?
It’s actually Nano by the same people, I think.
Ah, thankies. Quick google search sent me to http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/8833258/
by ~whistl3r
For themeXP and getskinned, which one is the boot and which one is the login screens?
Shimi, boot screen is the initial screen you see (i.e. WinXP is loading). Login screen is the one you see aftewards, that might prompt you for a user password to get into Windows.
If you’re asking about which is which, I suggest you don’t fool around with them much. While not an advance customize, both are definitely not for novices; esp. if something goes wrong.
Moyism, thanks for this tutorial. Very very helpful! Very simple too, considering im a skinning newbie.
NB:Nano font is so tiny!! XD I like it.
Just wondering.. how u remove the recycle bin?
If you’re running WinXP, d/l the newest version of TweakUI. It’ll allow you to easily remove the Recycle Bin from the desktop.
mayu i know where i can d/L that?
This is the only blog I’ve added to my links after reading only two pages of it. You’re da man, but I just can’t find the Nano msstyles.
whoops, got it, nvm.
Thanks a lot for this tutorial.. it really helped me, who was always checkin’ your COOL desktops, and wonderin’ how’d i make them myself…
I think my desktop’s now a hella lot better…
Does this thing work with Windows Media Center, too?
I honestly would not know. I suggest googling to find out.
can u tell me where you got that wallpaper for your swordsman love post? or better yet, send it to me? i cant seem to find it on 4chan.org
oh, and nice tutorial btw. I read through it because i was bored, but i use an aternative desktop. so it was all pointless for me to read through it. strange? i thought so.
Fuck this, your tutorial says to do exactly what Ive tried and they just wont show up in my desktop preferences anywhere.
oh… i still not found where to download these wallpaper… -_-!