Since the l’m currently in far-off lands visiting a friend, I’m using the small amount of downtime that I have to complete a project that I’ve been tweaking off and on for the past month. So instead of highlighting a place worth visiting in the “real” world, I’m going to transport you to a strange, vibrant place, birthed from pure imagination. What I’m about to show you is the result of many hours of patience and focus, and I’d love to hear what you think about it in the comments. Even if you despise it!

Today I’m releasing a complete refresh of Crescent Island, and I’m calling it Crescent Dawn. I think this one will be more popular than the previous wallpaper set (called MorningTide), because it’s easier on the eyes, it’s more elegant, and has a more relaxing and dynamic color palette. I’ve even added some surprises.

You remember the old Crescent Island, don’t you?

I created it nine long years ago when I was first getting comfortable with the (now mostly-forgotten) 3D rendering app called Bryce. And, oddly enough, years later I discovered that island that I’d created bared a striking resemblance to Molokini Island in Hawaii, despite the fact that I’d created it years before I’d ever seen photos of that island. (Coincidence, or something more?)

I first revisited Crescent Island in 2008 and released a new version called Crescent Island Nightfall in the summer of that year. While being an improvement over the original (mostly because I understood lighting much better than I had when I’d created it six years previously), it still lacked a certain elegance. The atmosphere still wasn’t quite there.

The Warm Cozy Colors

Fast forward three years to a couple months ago when I began toying with the scene again. That’s when it hit me.

I realized that Crescent Island would be beautiful bathed in the warm, womb-like colors of the morning. So, after hours of experimentation and tweaking, I’m very pleased to present Crescent Dawn to you now. It’s the result of uncounted hours of fine-tuning and revision. (Somewhere between 10 and 10 billion hours.) And, per the suggestion of a friend, I even added some wildlife to give the island a more lively flare. I hope you find it refreshing. I’m especially pleased with how the sky came out.

What do you think?

Get the new wallpaper in Widescreen (up to 2560×1600) —>
Get the new wallpaper in Fullscreen (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons license. These wallpapers look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600. That’s over 4 million pixels of goodness to make your desktop look as incredible as possible. With so much free content on Byteful Gallery, why not tell a friend?
 

Read related articles

1. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Crescent Nightfall
2. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Indigo Island
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper & Be A Mind At Play

I’ll explain.

Nearly nine long years ago, I created a 3D scene in the now mostly-forgotten rendering program called Bryce. The scene wasn’t complex. A lake, a mountain peak, and a couple trees were all that was under its blue sky. I called it “Calm Peak”, and as simple as that wallpaper was, it was a clear step along my path of understanding what made a good image different from a boring image. (You can see the original, “Calm Peak”, in the Byteful Gallery.)

Then, in 2008, I returned to “Calm Peak” and started tweaking it. I wondered what the same place might look like if the atmosphere were actually interesting. You know, something besides typical boring blue with white stratus clouds. So I added some haze into the atmosphere and moved the sun to right about morning time.

Fast forward three years, I discover this often forgotten remnant of my early work. I realized that, knowing what I know now, it could be tweaked and made into something interesting. So last night, after some careful positioning of the elements in the scene, I left the computer to render the final scene at a size appropriate for even the largest monitors (2560×1600 pixels).

The Glorious Result

I awoke this morning to find a vibrant, warm image on my screen. But as I often do, I opened up Photoshop and started tweaking again. I tweaked its specific color curves using a “selective color” adjustment layer (a technique that has utterly changed how I work with color in Photoshop and worth an article all on its own), and I ended up being swept away by inspiration and created 2 derivative flavors of the wallpaper, as well.

So, long story short, I’m pleased to present to you 3 delicious flavors of a new wallpaper set:

• Morningtide – Mango
• Morningtide – Strawberry
• Morningtide – Boysenberry

The one below is mango-flavored. Doesn’t it look positively yummy?

Get the new wallpaper in Widescreen (up to 2560×1600) —>
Get the new wallpaper in Fullscreen (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons license. These wallpapers look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600. That’s over 4 million pixels of goodness to make your desktop look as incredible as possible. With so much free content on Byteful Gallery, why not tell a friend?

Read related articles

1. Widescreen Wallpapers Now Mobile Wallpapers
2. Why Being Obsessive isn’t always Bad (& New Snowy wallpapers)
3. How to Avoid Getting Sick in the Winter (& Relaxifying Snowy wallpapers)

Despite the cold, it was a beautiful day for biking; and the sky was a pristine blue that, ironically enough, was very nearly the color of the wallpaper that I’m going to share with you today. Often, we travel less in the winter; so although your body won’t go anywhere, I hope that this wallpaper will help transport you to a more relaxified place in your mind and remind you to keep your focus on the positive: the warmer days to come.

As we enter the last few weeks of winter, I’m excited to present “Joyful Day”, the final piece from the Snowy Cascade wallpaper series. It’s the brightest winter-themed wallpaper I’ve ever released, not to mention one of the brightest wallpapers I’ve ever created. And what better time to brighten up the mood than in late winter?

In fact, as I type these words the wallpaper is set as my own desktop background, and it seems to exude an interesting mix of calmness and focus. Compared to most of the other snowy wallpapers, this one is much more relaxing on the eyes; and it definitely has the most relaxing color palette of them all. In fact, it’s probably the best winter-themed wallpaper I’ve ever created. So why does it work so well?

The Deceptive Yet Powerful Nature of Color

Well, if you haven’t done any graphic design before, you may not realize that the concept of color can be extremely tricky. Some have even said that color’s nature is to deceive, but it’s more accurate to say that color’s nature is to be relative and surprisingly unpredictable. For instance, have you ever tried putting a bright red shape right beside a bright blue shape on your screen? The edge where the red and blue meet will look really wild, creating a dissonance that is uncomfortable, to say the least. Color dissonance like this can even cause headaches. Yet other color combinations can produce a calming effect. How?

The reason for this is due to how your eyes and brain process color. As you probably know, a color is basically a specific frequency of light, and these frequencies can be mixed to produce interesting effects. In fact, according to some studies, seeing certain shades of blue can actually cause the body to produce chemicals that are calming. And I’ve experienced this firsthand.

How did I choose one shade… out of thousands?

Art is deceiving. At first glance, you’d probably never guess how much time went into fine-tuning the final shades of blue used in “Joyful Day”, but it was completely worth it. As I usually do, I relied on my own intuition for choosing the right shade. But there are thousands of shades of blue. Pick the wrong blue, and the work becomes cold instead of calming. Pick the right shade of blue, and you can change the dynamic of someone’s workspace, creating calm. Pick the perfect shade of blue, and you may even be able to evoke childhood memories of Easter.

The kind of excitement and expectation found during Easter and Spring is exactly the feeling I hope this wallpaper evokes in you. To me, this wallpaper represents the tail-end of winter and the promise of a green spring. (A time when, in my opinion, it’s much more enjoyable to travel.)

If winter is getting you down, let this radiant wallpaper transport you to a brighter vision of winter that leads to a swift spring. Remember, spring is fast upon us!

Get the new wallpaper in Widescreen (up to 2560×1600) —>
Get the new wallpaper in Fullscreen (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons license. These wallpapers look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600. That’s over 4 million pixels of goodness to make your desktop look as incredible as possible. With so much free content on Byteful Gallery, why not tell a friend?

Read related articles

1. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Crystal
2. How to Avoid Getting Sick in the Winter (& Relaxifying Snowy wallpapers)
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Sight Indigo (& Tedium in Art)

So today we’re going to talk about keeping art (and your health!) from falling through the cracks, how to prevent yourself from getting sick in the winter, and a lesson in being aware of your surroundings.

I’ve gotta be completely honest with you though: I’ve been holding some stuff back. I purposely waited until after the holidays to release these three chillaxed flavors of Snowy Cascade that I’m releasing today. Because what’s the point if I release all 11 wallpapers at once? It’s too much at once! And inevitably some would fall through the cracks and fail to be appreciated. These 3 new additions to the Snowy Cascade Clear wallpaper set are:

• Snowy Cascade Clear – Morning
• Snowy Cascade Clear – Dark
• Snowy Cascade Clear – Night

Based on some profoundly unscientific polls that I’ve done this month, I expect that these three flavors will be even more popular than the previous 5 flavors because people seemed to prefer the “Clear” look.

Avoid Falling through the Cracks (In Art & Health!)

As I mentioned above, I held these back because if I released too much content at once, some would fall through the cracks. Good art can fall through the cracks not unlike how a harmful virus can get through the armor of one’s own immune system. When travelling it’s extremely important to pay attention to how your immune system is doing, because you’re certainly not going to have any fun if you’re bedridden the whole time.

And this time of year, people getting sick from viruses is more common because people often indulge in lots of sugary foods during the holidays, which produces a spike in blood sugar. What they don’t know is, the resulting blood sugar low leaves you with a highly weakened immune system, which is precisely when viruses take hold. Another reason we have weakened immune systems in the winter is the fact that sunlight is much less direct in the wintertime (due to the tilt of the Earth) which means it takes much more exposure to sunlight for your skin to create enough vitamin D for the day. (Not to mention that you probably don’t want to be outside getting some sun anyway since it’s so cold!)

This combination of increased sugar and decreased Vitamin D is the main cause of the “flu season” that is so common during these winter months.

I should know since over the past few days I narrowly avoided catching a virus myself. I could even feel my body fighting it, and when I was hit with a wave of sleepiness, I listened to my body and took a nap. (And naps are unusual for me.)

I’ve only managed to successfully fight this virus off through careful nutritional planning and a high level of awareness of my own body. For instance, I’ve been making sure I get lots of a vitamin C (I ate 4 oranges yesterday), as well as Vitamin D. Being a vegan most days of the week (and a vegetarian on the other days), most of my vitamin D comes from fortified sources. (Right now my favorite way to get Vitamin D is from Almond Milk since, for a variety of reasons, cows milk actually decreases immune function.)

By carefully avoiding refined sugars, making sure my Vitamin C & D levels were high, and drinking plenty of water, I was able to fortify my immune system to deal with the current buggy environment.

A Funny Story about Mistaken Identity & Vitamin D

Speaking of Vitamin D, when I was a kid I was walking through a grocery store, wandering away from my family and daydreaming, as usual. (Are you surprised?) After a few minutes, I stumbled across a strange kind of milk. The cap was a different color than I’d seen before, and I turned to my Dad who was nearby to ask him what kind of milk it was.

“What kind of milk is this? It seems different”, I asked.

Except that the man wasn’t my Dad at all. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was him, but that reality soon shattered. This man, who was about the height of my father, turned around and in a very deep voice said, “VITAMIN D.” (Yes that warrants all capital letters. If you’d heard him, you’d put capital letters too.)

Taken aback, I gasped and looked up at him. I tried not to look surprised and just went with it. “Ah! Thanks…”

On that day, I learned a valuable lesson about being very aware of your surroundings. And this applies equally to travel and health. Think about it.

Fits the Times Perfectly

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the 3 new wallpapers and have amazing New Year celebration. Remember to be aware of your bodies and eat sugary foods in moderation!

As a sample, I’ve put a preview of the muted Snowy Cascade Clear “Dark” version. And I think it fits this time of year perfectly, don’t you?

Which flavor do you like best?

Get the new wallpaper in Widescreen (up to 2560×1600) —>
Get the new wallpaper in Fullscreen (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. These wallpapers will look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600 (about a 30 inch screen). That’s 4,096,000 pixels of goodness to make your desktop look as incredible as possible. With so much free content on Byteful Travel, why not tell a friend?

Read related articles

1. Why Being Obsessive isn’t always Bad (& New Snowy wallpapers)
2. How Color Transports You Across the Seasons (& A New Winter Wallpaper)
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Crystal

Instead of taking you on an adventure to the West Coast, today I’m going to take you on an adventure through color and form. We’re going to discuss powerful perspective changes, breaking tradition, and why being obsessive isn’t always necessarily a bad thing. And on top of all of that, I’ve got a Festivus gift for you: 5 gorgeous desktop wallpapers to get you into the Festivus spirit. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

First of all, welcome to the Winter Solstice. There really is nothing like Mid-December, is there? It’s a time when much of North America gets under 9 hours of daylight, and people who thrive on daylight start to get slightly grumpy.

Tomorrow will be the 7th anniversary of when I first created Snowy Sight, one of my most popular desktop wallpapers ever, and I’m so pleased at how far this piece of art has come since then. In some ways, it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve continued to return to it again and again, refining it for over five years; but I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy creating it and using it every winter. So today, I’m excited to present to you the new Snowy Cascade wallpaper set, based off of the original Snowy Sight wallpaper from all the way back in 2003. And this year I’m releasing 5 variations (what I like to call “flavors”, which you can see slices of each to the right). It’s my gift to you all, my loyal readers, and I think you’re going to love them.

Isn’t it funny how your perspective changes?

I hadn’t used the Snowy Sight wallpaper in about a year, but once Wisconsin was hit by its first snowstorm a couple weeks ago, I started thinking about it again. I felt the urge to improve it once more.

In a strangely metaphorical way, you might even say that this image is a reflection of myself over the years. As time passes, it becomes more crisp, more honed, and more dynamic. And, like all of my work, it builds on what came before it.

Breakin’ all the Rulz

Traditionally, Snowy Sight has been a shade of blue or indigo, but I really wanted to spice things up this time, so I added new dynamics of color: magentas, violets, and greens. I’d been taking some photographs of Christmas lights the day before, and on whim I decided to drop one of the photos into the Snowy Sight project as a blending layer.

At first, I was intrigued, but I soon realized something wasn’t quite right. Adding the photo added color, but didn’t look right just yet. I needed a way to communicate this new color mix more abstractly.

After experimenting, I realized that my old friend, the crystalline filter, worked really well in this case. Ergo, the crystalline shapes you may be familiar with from Snowy Crystal are back, but they filter from behind the snow flakes this time.

Originally, perhaps I got a little too passionate about the new color scheme and used a super vibrant version for about a day…

Until I realized that my eyeballs were metaphorically bleeding. It was just too intense for everyday use which is precisely what my wallpapers are intended for, so I did lots of experiments before I found a good balance of subtlety. In practice, this can be a difficult balance to strike because you don’t want a piece of graphic design to be too tiring on the eyes, but you don’t want it to be bland either. However, since this a matter of personal taste, one of the 5 flavors I’m releasing today is pretty colorful, but it’s not too intense either.

Radical Combobulations

Remember when I invented wallpaper mashups three years ago?

If you do, you may recognize this wallpaper as employing that technique. By creatively combining a crystalized photo with the existing smooth shapes of the snow flakes, I drew on techniques from the two previous Snowy Sight wallpapers, and the result is unique and quite pleasing to eyes.

But it wasn’t as easy as you may think.

More Time than You’d Ever Suspect

An inordinate amount of testing went into testing and refining these desktop wallpapers — more time than you’d expect.

Why?

Well, unless you’ve created things like this yourself, you probably don’t realize the amount of tiny details and refinements that must be made before a wallpaper is published. For instance, the new delicate outlines around the flakes had to be meticulously tweaked to look… “right”.

To be brutally honest, you can’t fully appreciate a craft until you do it for yourself, but that’s okay. This is the nature of all art, and nothing to be ashamed of.

However, it is helpful to keep in mind that much more goes into these wallpapers than what can be assumed at first glance. Each wallpaper is tested on multiple displays, and small details and blend modes are refined until they’re just right.

Even Digital Art can be Unforgiving

Much enthusiasm has been generated over the flexibility that artists now have with programs like Photoshop and Lightroom because changes can now be made much more quickly and precisely than with any previous non-digital method. But creating this wallpaper reminded me that even digital art can be unforgiving sometimes.

For instance, when I was nearly done refining this wallpaper set, I noticed that one particular crystal was touching the edge of a flake, creating a small shining line that looked completely out of place. So I had to shift the entire crystalline layer and export all 5 versions again. And this involved manually changing multiple layers to different settings for each flavor of the wallpaper. (And situations like this are not uncommon when refining a piece of graphic design.)

I do it for the Love. Why do you do it?

Maybe I’m crazy to be this particular, but I love creating these images, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. And for me, part of loving it is being obsessive about the small details, because when added together, all of the small details either make or break the whole.

Yes, these details require time and patience to get right, but it’s definitely worth it. Being “obsessive” about something has got a bad reputation in western society. But at the end of the day, being obsessive isn’t always such a bad thing if you’re aware of your own behavior and still able to control yourself; especially if the end result is something enjoyed by many. Which is why today, I’m very pleased to present to you all: Snowy Cascade.

All 5 flavors of this desktop wallpaper (Warm, Morningtime, Dark, Night, and Cyan) are available in Fullscreen and Widescreen sizes, in resolutions up to a fantastic 2560×1600 pixels, in the Byteful Gallery.

I hope they bring you joy and delight you during this holiday season, whatever you celebrate. But to me, it’s a Festivus miracle.

Get it in Widescreen (up to 2560×1600) —>
Get it in Fullscreen (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. These wallpapers will look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600 (about a 30 inch screen). That’s 4,096,000 pixels of goodness to make your desktop look as incredible as possible. With so much free content on Byteful Travel, why not tell a friend?

Read related articles

1. How to Avoid Getting Sick in the Winter (& Relaxifying Snowy wallpapers)
2. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Sight Indigo (& Tedium in Art)
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Crystal

Ever since I wrote my review of Steve Pavlina’s wonderfully unconventional self-development book Personal Development for Smart People, I’ve wanted to create a Truth-Love-Power Pyramid worthy of the ideas that it expresses. And today, I’m really pleased to be able to present you with the picture that was more or less in my head.

If you’re not familiar with the Truth-Love-Power Pyramid, it’s a visual representation of 3 irreducible principles that Steve Pavlina, the most well-known person growth writer on the web, has identified as being the keys to growth. There are also secondary principles like Oneness. The short version of all this is, the more in alignment you are with Truth, Love, and Power in your daily experience, the more intelligent you are. If you’re curious to learn more, I highly recommend you checkout my review of Steve’s book, which I found to be the most unique and useful book I’ve ever read on personal growth, as well as the basis for the principles visually represented in this article.

An Alright Start

The pyramid to the right is the pyramid Steve has used on his blog in the past. Not a bad start, right? It clearly shows how the principles of Truth, Love, and Power combine in different ways, such as a combination of alignment with Truth and Love opens you up to greater alignment with the concept of Oneness, for instance. And it clearly shows that the combination/culmination of all 3 principles is Intelligence.

So while this simple graphic is clearly functional, it’s not much else. It doesn’t communicate the ideas with as much depth as the ideas deserve. (For instance, it’s not leveraging color or depth to communicate the ideas.) In the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to do this when I originally wrote my review of the book, but I had other projects on my plate at the time. Because of this, I published my review of Personal Development for Smart People without any graphics included.

Today, that changes.

Networking Works

Then, while reading some other reviews of the book, I came across this graphic over at Life Coaches Blog:

Now this was a HUGE improvement! By using color to represent the principles, Alvin draws an elegant parallel between how color frequencies combine and how the principles themselves combine in a very similar way. And although he missed out on a great opportunity to emphasize Intelligence as a natural combination of all these colors (i.e., a beacon of white light), his elegant parallel with color really inspired me.

Fast forward almost two years to a couple months ago, and I stumbled upon this colorful graphic once again. And, after setting aside some time, I decided to begin experimenting with this idea, this metaphor of colors combining just as the principles of Truth, Love, and Power do. I realized I didn’t agree with Alvin’s choice of color. Love should definitely be red, right? At least in the Western World, it makes more cultural sense for Love to be colored red. (That being said, I fully realize that many of you are not from Western countries, and I’m very grateful for you!)

For slightly more complex reasons, I decided that blue is an appropriate color for Truth. (And as I write this article, I’ve noticed that “trueness” is listed as a common connotation of blue in its wikipedia page). So that leaves green for Power, which is excellent for the logical inferences of which I’m sure I don’t have to explain.

The Perfect Parallel for Intelligence

So! With the colors set, the secondary colors came automatically. After creating and tweaking the appropriate radial rainbow gradient in Photoshop, I started adding in the labels of Truth, Love, Power, Intelligence, etc. And I realized that white is the only logical color for Intelligence.

Think about it.

When you combine of all three primary colors of light (those being red, green, and blue) the wavelengths overlap each other and produce white light. You can see the reverse of this effect when white light enters a prism. Even beyond the obvious logical parallel to white light, there are also cultural parallels such as knowledge being the light of the world, and so on.

And so, through much experimentation and testing, I’m very pleased to present to you two new desktop wallpapers today. One with the labels, and one with the TLP Pyramid without any words to distract from its spectral beauty.

I’ve exported these as PNG files because the gradients needed more color depth than a JPEG file could provide. They should work fine, but if you have any problems with them, please let me know in the comments.

Get Them!

Widescreen Wallpapers (up to 2560×1600) —>
Fullscreen Wallpapers (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons license. These wallpapers will look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600. With so much free content on Byteful Gallery, why not tell a friend?

Read related articles

1. Personal Development for Smart People & Travel
2. How Color Transports You Across the Seasons (& A New Winter Wallpaper)
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Indigo Island

I’m sure you’ve already noticed the most obvious part, the new Byteful Travel logo on the top of every page. The background has also been revamped and text styles have also been tweaked to better match the new look. And seriously, this update is overdue. None of the site-wide graphics had been changed since January, and the site had been in need of an overhaul for a while.

So today, I’m spilling the beans, sharing some of the world’s ugliest webpages with you, and showing you a few core reasons why visual design is very, very important.

And the funny part is, I never planned to complete these changes this weekend, but inspiration struck me. I’ll elaborate on that later on, but first I must address the question:

Why are these design changes so important?

Well, when designing a website, it’s really important that it be visually accessible, as well as functional. The visual layout and color choice on a webpage has a profound effect on how you process the information on that page. Think about it.

The Ugliest Webpages on the Net

I’ll give you a couple of examples of what not to do, mostly because it illustrates my point, but also because sharing ugly webpages with you is pretty enjoyable in its own right.

And of course, the best place to find examples of what NOT to do when designing a webpage is on MySpace! Here’s a myspace page that illustrates what happens when you don’t know what contrast is: amiecmonjohn

It can get much worse than this though. How much worse? You don’t want to know… at least, you’ll probably want to turn down your volume or mute your speakers before you discover the glory that is this wonderful cacophony of visual and audial insanity: ukcraigb

But animated GIFs and looping MIDIs aside, would you really want to keep reading something on a site that had serious layout or color problems? I realize those two examples aren’t typical, but they’re great examples of how a website’s appearance can dramatically affect how you process information. (Although that song on the 2nd page is starting to get stuck in my head since I’m letting it play as I write this. I know, perhaps I’m crazy but it actually grows on you.)

In light of how the layout and color balance of a webpage affect how you process the information on this website, I carefully designed this major revision to invite you to be even more comfortable while reading Byteful Travel, as well as to attract new readers. And, as a travel site, it’s important that Byteful Travel’s appearance evoke an adventurous, and even mysterious, feeling when you’re visiting here. And I believe these new changes do just that.

Simplifying Type & The Dangers of a Free Typeface

Basically, the header really needed a cleaner, more identifiable appearance, and one of the things I did to achieve that was to remove the secondary text that used to be below the words “Byteful Travel”. Now, the header simply reads “Byteful Travel”, and truthfully, that’s all it ever needed. (Fun fact: this is the first time the header has only included 2 words, and no other types of letterforms, since June 2007. That’s a while!)

You may also notice that I’m using a completely different, and much more relevant, typeface for the logo in the header now. This lovely typeface is called Carolingia, and the celtic brush style to the letterforms lends an older, and more worldly feel to the header. I’ve also taken the time to manually join some of the letters together, as if they were written by an actual inked pen. (I tried it on two letters and realized it would be unwise of me to stop because it looked so much better. Alas, this is what designers do.)

I fully realize that not everyone is going to notice a subtle detail like that, but it’s in my nature to make everything as polished as it can be (within a reasonable timeframe, of course).

However, since this typeface is available for free at DaFont.com, some designers would suggest that I have treaded into unprofessional waters. In fact, some designers look down on any typefaces offered for free as automatically inferior to their commercial counterparts. This bias within the industry has existed for some time, and perhaps it started out with good reason. (Free typefaces used to be utter crap.) But today there is no excuse for passing up a very polished typeface, even if it’s available freely. At any rate, I don’t mind if designers have a problem with my typeface choice. I’m pleased at how it works within the new logo. And unless they can offer constructive criticism, their words won’t factor into my actions.

Charamandala

You also ought to notice the newly polished Charamandala (the circular logo to the right of the header). In case you’re not up to speed, the Charamandala was introduced as Byteful Travel’s logo in April 2009. (Some wallpapers were even based on it.) It was then completely overhauled in December 2009 in preparation for the complete upgrade and facelift that the site got in January 2010.

Over the weekend, the shape itself wasn’t changed at all, but the Charamandala’s shading and feel of substance has been greatly improved, making it much more visually soothing as well as easier to see from a distance.

So why does this new design work?

In fact, looking at the before and after like is a fantastic way to show off why this new design works. Most obviously, the site has gone from a monochromatic look (i.e., way the heck too much blue), to a duo-chromatic look of cyan and dark indigo. The header text is much more expressive and intriguing; and the background gives the entire site much more depth than it had before. (Not to mention it evokes sands or ocean waves, which both imply far-off lands and travel.)

All of this serves to better visually organize the information on this site. In fact, this is the highest contrasting header I’ve ever created for the site, and it works because it draws the eye’s attention to where it belongs, while at the same time soothing the eye. First the eye goes to the logo text, and then it goes down to the title of the article which flows into the body of an article. It’s like Chicken Voila—it’s magic!

You know, metaphorically speaking…

Acting out of Inspiration

Now here’s the funny part. As I mentioned before, the actions that resulted in this new site-wide design were triggered by inspiration. Instead of chaining my soul to my To Do list, I’ve been paying more and more attention to my feelings and what’s inspiring me in the present moment; and I act on those inspirations whenever I can. You could say I’ve been listening to my heart instead of just my head. Perhaps the inspiration for this… inspiration idea has been Steve Pavlina’s 30 day inspiration trial that I’ve been following for the past week. As he correctly illustrates, when we act out of inspiration, we can create higher quality work; and this work will be much more in tune with our hearts, because true inspiration only comes from a heart-based place.

So this weekend, I felt inspired, and instead of writing down “revise yadda yadda something header project” (in classic GTD style, of course) in my to do list, I decided to sit down and act on the inspiration while it was still hot. And the result was that, not only did I finished these revisions much faster than I anticipated, the finished product was also better than I imagined!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these changes, and I hope you learned something. I know I did.

Read related articles

1. How to Design Your Own Travel Inventory (Design your Optimal Packing List)
2. Find Inspiration Everywhere with Quotes
3. Photography Lessons Apply to Life

If you’ve been reading Byteful Travel for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally (read: very rarely) release desktop wallpapers on the gallery. And if you haven’t been aware that there are dozens of free desktop wallpapers in the gallery, consider this your formal invitation to check them out!

And although it may not be immediately obvious, these desktops are usually travel-related. Instead of taking you to Earthly places through travel photography, the digitally rendered and painted wallpapers are meant to transport you to a place you may have only seen in your dreams. Most of my work in the Fullscreen and Widescreen wallpaper galleries is meant to evoke a feeling.

So today, I have three visual morsels for your eyes, and they’re some of the most joyous wallpapers I’ve ever created.

What do you get when you add a mosaic and a silk ocean?

Late last month, I started playing around with mashing up two wallpapers again. I’d already done this in the past with the Snowy Peak mashup (and I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 years since I created it), and this time I was working on combining Sol over Silk Ocean and Digital Mosaic.

Not as easy as it looks.
But, as I said before, the result are some of the most joyous wallpapers I’ve ever created.

Tinker to Find Solutions

If you’ve never played around in Photoshop before, you’re really missing out. The way you can manipulate and combine imagery is actually really incredible, and once you’re comfortable with the program, using it feels more like play than work.

After a lot of experimentation, I decided it was best to combine just the mosaic pattern and not include the numbers from Digital Mosaic. (The numbers made it too cluttered.) After a few sessions of experimentation (in which I existed in a flow state), I finally got the composition and blast of color I was looking for. (If you’re curious, it involved a Color blend and a Linear Light blend.)

Time and time again, working in Photoshop shows me that tinkering is a fantastic way to solve problems. If I never tried something without knowing the outcome in advance, I wouldn’t learn much. By taking some risks, I stumbled upon solutions I never would have thought of. And that’s ironic because this parallels life as well, doesn’t it?

I Could Tell, but I’ll Show

Risks certainly paid off here; and I could go into sublimely mind-numbing detail on the process I followed such as how I spent time making certain squares in the mosaic element darker and certain squares lighter (because I guess I’m pretty eccentric/obsessive about visual projects by now), but I’ll skip over that so I don’t inflame your ADHD even more than, I’m sure, it already is.

So, time to show and not tell.
I present: Cherry Mango Sunrise.

And if you’re an anti-mosaic-ite and would prefer the sky without any squares, I’ve created a version without squares (as well as a rockin’ cool blue version), and put them in the gallery. As I said above, this is one of the most joyous wallpapers I’ve ever created, and although it doesn’t represent a specific place you can visit (like my travel photography, for instance), I hope it can bring you to a specific feeling.

As always, the desktops are available in widescreen or fullscreen sizes, in resolutions up to an astoundingly ginormous 2560×1600 for widescreen and 1600×1200 for fullscreen.

To me, this wallpaper symbolizes Joy and Hope for the future.

When you look at Cherry Mango sunrise, what do you see?

Read related articles

1. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Ocean of Twilight
2. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Crystal
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Charamandala 1

Today I’d like to share with you a visual summary of that message, a high-rez image that can be printed out or used as a desktop wallpaper. Behold! Walt Disney’s famous words:

“We don’t make movies to make money,
we make money to make more movies.”
~ Walt Disney

So beautiful in its simplicity. So rewarding to contemplate.

I won’t lie to you, it takes a lot of effort to get to that place in your own life, but it’s one of the most worthwhile accomplishments you can ever make.

As I said in the last InspirationEverywhere entry, it’s important that you be patient with yourself and remember that everyone is a work in progress. Along that journey of self-improvement, Disney’s words serve as a useful guide of what it really feels like to be aligned with your passion. You see, what Disney is really describing here is his company’s alignment with three things: what they enjoy doing, what work they feel is important, and what other people enjoy.

Let’s deconstruct that for a minute. If Disney didn’t enjoy what he was doing, he wouldn’t really care about making movies that exemplified timeless lessons. If he didn’t feel that the messages could benefit people, he wouldn’t create movies at all. And if other people didn’t enjoy the movies, he simply wouldn’t have the resources to make more.

A Positive Spiral

Another way to describe being truly aligned with passion is the idea of a positive spiral. If you were doing the work you really loved (work that also fed/clothed you), you’d allow yourself really dive into that work, wouldn’t you? And what would happen to your skill level? You would improve in that work, wouldn’t you? Which means your level of contribution would increase, which would in turn increase the amount of people who benefitted from your work. And this would increase your income, thereby freeing you up more and more to increase the quality of your creative output. This is the positive creative spiral: a place of alignment and congruency with who you truly are.

Today, make it your aim to create a positive spiral in your own life. To help facilitate this process, you can print this poster out and put it somewhere you’ll see it so you can be reminded of his message everyday: Disney Quote – “We don’t make movies to make money…”

— — —
The poster of this quote is in the Byteful Gallery > InspirationEverywhere Motivational Quotes album. Selected Quotes from the gallery are now available on T-shirts and mugs at the Byteful Store.

Read related articles

1. Create with Passion or DIE
2. It Takes A Long Time to Become Fully You. ~ Björk

An idea practically hit me over the head on Sunday: what if people could share their nutritional choice in a supportive, yet unobtrusive and attractive way? I wondered why anyone hadn’t tackled this design challenge before. I’d never seen anything like the idea in my head before. Thus, the Powered by Plants badge was born.

Leafy Choices

The basic design for the graphic was already in my head, but it would take graphic design skills and patience to create something attractive and versatile. I decided to follow the design style I started when I created the CommentLuv badge for Andy over at ComLuv.com, which is really excellent plugin for WordPress and other blogging platforms that encourages blog discussion. The difficult part was deciding on what kind of leaf to use. I experimented with lots of different leaves (including some kind of 7-pointed leaf, but something didn’t quite fit), so I eventually settled on a broad leaf you see below.

Spread the Word about your Conscious Choice

Whether you’re a macrobiotic eater, fruitarian, vegetarian, raw vegan, or normal vegan, these badges are a snazzy way to spread the word about your conscious nutritional choice. If you use one of the badges, I would very much appreciate you spread the love and link back to the Spread the Word page so that others can get a Powered by Plants badge that matches their own nutritional choice. Spread the word that, by making conscious nutritional decisions, we become healthier creators. If there’s some “-ian” or “-gan” that you’d like for your own site that I haven’t included here, please let me know in the comments.

Choose a badge —>
— — —
UPDATE: White versions of the small badges are here!

And if you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments below.

Read related articles

1. Portland Voodoo Doughnut Review: Bacon-Maple bars & Vegan donuts on the menu!

Artistic Incubation

As I’ve often hinted at in the past, when creating something non-urgent I often start a project, complete more than half of it, and then forget about it for a few months. This kind of artistic incubation can be beneficial because when I return to the project, I return to it with fresh eyes, and see problems and possibilities that I didn’t see when I first created it. This process is also recommended for authors, that they should write an entire first draft without looking back and then let the first draft sit without looking at it for a few months.

Continual First Draft

Often, new authors will continually, some might say obsessively, revise the first chapter of their book only to never complete a first draft at all. This kind of resistance is something that all creators tackle. Once a first draft is complete, I tend to stow it away and forget about it for a while. It’s possible that this forgetting allows my unconscious mind to work on the problem in the background for months. However it works, I know that it does work.

After I’d created the logo for this website in July, I decided that, as a design element, it might work well as the central focus in a piece of visual art. So in September, I started experimenting. And today, I’m happy to present the fruits of my efforts.

What’s Not in a Name?

See that white symbol in the top center of this page? That’s the Charamandala—the unique logo for Byteful Travel. The name is a conjugation of two words that are quite old. Chara means joy in Greek, and mandala is from the Sanskrit word mandalam, which means circle. (Note to the seeker, there is much to learn about mandalas. Recommended research.)

I’ve dubbed this wallpaper Charamandala 1, because I suspect this won’t be the last desktop wallpaper to feature the charamandala. Charamandala 1 comes in aglow and deep versions and is available in widescreen or fullscreen sizes.

And feel free to let me know what you think.

Read related articles

1. New Widescreen Wallpaper & Be A Mind At Play
2. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Indigo Island
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Crescent Nightfall

Before I ever created a gallery to make my wallpapers available for free online, I created them for myself. It was only after experimenting with an iTools account (a now defunct service that provided high-quality web hosting for free) that I realized the potential to share what I had created — to share my solutions to the problem of an uninspirational, or worse, visually-stressful desktop wallpaper.

Restless Digital Artist

I had been using Snowy Sight 2009 Indigo for a while, and I got restless. To be honest, I got bored with it rather quickly, so once again I starting playing around with it in Photoshop. My original intention with was to create a binary-looking version of Snowy Sight — something that wasn’t afraid to show an aliased pixel edge or two. Simply pixelizing the flakes wasn’t enough, and I explored different filters and tools to try and create the desired effect. In my experimenting I noticed that the crystalize function produced an interesting ice-like effect, that worked well with the snow flakes.

A Cyan Plan

I also began experimenting with other hues for the wallpaper. Red felt too strong to use for a winter wallpaper, and I felt similarly about the other warm colors of the spectrum. However, a cyan hue had a certain appeal and hadn’t been done before. (For those of you who are unsure, cyan is the color between green and blue on the color spectrum.) When I shifted the hue to cyan, the way the gradient gets lighter to the top reminded me of the early morning sun hitting the snow flakes and causing them to melt. Bingo.

I call this new wallpaper collection Snowy Crystal. The wallpaper comes in 4 variations, including deep (i.e. darker) flavors:

• Snowy Crystal Cyan Aglow
• Snowy Crystal Cyan Deep
• Snowy Crystal Indigo Aglow
• Snowy Crystal Indigo Deep

As always the desktops are available in widescreen or fullscreen sizes, up to 2560×1600 for widescreen and 1600×1200 for fullscreen.

Use these new desktop wallpapers to remind you that the snow will indeed melt… eventually. On the other hand, if you are in a warm climate, use them to remind you that snow does indeed exist.

And you should try driving in it sometime.

Read related articles

1. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Sight Indigo (& Tedium in Art)
2. The Dam Ice and New Snowy Sight Wallpaper
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Ocean of Twilight