Dark Desktop Makeover

A desktop is kind of like a living room. In living room design, I like clean, modern, peaceful design with one thing that’s old and rugged to add contrast and texture. The same holds true for my desktop, except that I had one element: darkness. It’s soothing to contrast the brightness of the work screens with a dark desktop.

My Sunday afternoon project was to re-design the appearance of my desktop and I made three changes:

1. Created a new Wallpaper.
2. Changed icons.
3. Increased the size of the icons on the desktop.

This is the result (click to see a full-sized screen capture):

I like the end-result so I’m sharing the wallpaper. The icons are from Apple’s download page. I used some from two sets because I wanted to distinguish between folders on the Mac network and folders on the HP MediaSmart Server. The feed reader at the top is an Adobe Air app called Snackr. Here are the links:

Darkhand Wallpaper by Neal
Glass Folder Icons 1.0
Eclipse Icon Set 1.0
Snackr

2 Responses to “Dark Desktop Makeover”

1. Randy says:

   November 17, 2008 at 7:20 am

   I like it…but when I do a dark theme for some reason it get’s depressing to me and I have to change it after a week or two and get some color back.
   I have the same problem with firefox themes
2. Dave Peterson says:

   November 17, 2008 at 1:23 pm

   Very interesting look. And thanks for reminding me about Snackr. Downloading it now.