Simplify, simplify

Yesterday was a snow day in Chicago,

so I used a bit of my down time at home to tidy up some things. One of them was my home computer’s desktop. It’s a complicated mess of icons, and I haven’t changed the background image in months. I’d been thinking about putting a new background image on my desktop for a few days, ever since one of our designers here had his monitor quietly sabotaged with Justin Bieber photos while he was away from his desk at a meeting.

Even though it’s the first cluster of pixels I encounter every morning after booting up my machine, my desktop had become the equivalent of stale website content: never updated, without purpose, long-forgotten. It needed maintenance. It needed to be de-cluttered. It needed to be simplified, like most things involving the web.

With this in mind I ended up finding my way to Simple Desktops. This site was put together by Facebook product designer Tom Watson, who culled together “a collection of bling, drop shadow, and gradient free desktops to help keep you stay focused but also provide just enough eye candy to not be bored.” Some are more inspiring than others, but all are free to download. I really liked “Force Quit,” “Cassiopeia,” and “Tron Light.”