Free wallpapers for portrait monitors

Beautiful wallpapers for normal monitors are dime a dozen. In fact you will find links to quite a collection of wallpapers right on this blog. So what is unique about this set of wallpapers you might ask.

The USP of this collection is that it is optimized and targeted at portrait monitors - Those monitors whose height is larger than their width. Some of the wallpapers are a montage of numerous photos which have been stitched together to bring them to the required dimensions.

Check them out. They are indeed very beautiful.

100s of beautiful wallpapers free for the picking

No matter what OS I am running on my machine, one thing I really like to do is, adorn my desktop with is a beautiful, aesthetic, less distracting and pleasing to the eye wallpaper. I like my wallpapers to be vivid with colors but at the same time not be an eye sore. Nature, animals, abstract art, blue swirls ... are all my favorites.

Here are a couple of links which collectively have literally 100s of wallpapers of different hues, colors and designs. All of them are eye catching and quite a few are actually stunning. But I will let you be the judge of that.

• 218 HD Resolution Desktop Wallpapers for Nerds - This is a collection of wallpapers which are literally stunning. I do like the ones by Hamad Darwish who claims to be one of the few photographers commissioned by Microsoft in 2005 to shoot photos to be used in Windows Vista's Wallpaper Collection.
• Social wallpapering - This is a community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as computer wallpaper.
• Wallpaper images - And if you are a nature lover and like to swoon at flowers, leaves, pebbles, rocks, vegetables, fruits and what not, then this is the right place to be. Mike Swanson is a technical evangelist for err... Microsoft and he has made available his entire collection of wallpapers as a free download.
  

The best news is that you do not need to have explicit permission of Microsoft to use these wallpapers on your Linux desktop ;-) .

Announcing the winners of the Oxygen Wallpaper Contest

In August this year, the Oxygen team which are behind the famed Oxygen icons unveiled the Oxygen wallpaper contest. And the formal results are out. The response of the contest was supposedly overwhelming with over 2000 stunning photographs submitted by numerous KDE enthusiasts.

In an earlier post, I had talked about the work of Vlad Gerasimov and his stunning wallpapers. Well two of his entries (EOS and Emotion) have been selected to be included in the default set of wallpapers to be shipped with KDE 4.0. And of the two he submitted, one of them (EOS) has been chosen as the winning wallpaper. Um... I like the other one (Emotion) better, though I am happy the color is blue because blue is pleasing to the human eyes.

Fig: Winning wallpaper which will be the default in KDE 4.0

Many wallpapers in the final selection are stunning photographs of nature, flowers and animals. Do check out the complete selection of wallpapers destined to be shipped with KDE 4.0. Boy, I am brimming with anticipation of the treat that is in store for Open Source enthusiasts when KDE 4.0 is finally released.

Sexy Wallpapers for your Linux desktop

Any time you want to spruce up your mind while you are shackled to your computer, try changing the desktop background image to something pleasing to you. It will make a visible difference to your mental setup. It works every time for me. Some of the themes which lifts my mind when it is bogged down with work are nature themes, abstract art and beautiful cute looking wild animals.

A good wallpaper should work in making your computing experience a tad lighter without being a distraction.

Vlad Gerasimov runs his own design company called Vladstudio which specialize in web design and development, database-driven sites, skins, icons, logotypes and collateral graphics. In his spare time, he is in the habit of creating beautiful looking wallpapers which he then makes available to all in different screen sizes to adorn your desktop including for dual monitors.

He is also purported to be a contestant in the Oxygen Wallpaper contest.

Of his diverse set of wallpapers, I do like the ones shown below. They are quite pleasing without being an eyesore.