PlasmaDesign.co.uk - Wonderful desktop images

Jun 01, '04 11:00:00AM

Contributed by: robg

PlasmaDesign iconThe macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[Score: 10 out of 10]

This week's PotW is slightly off the usual track -- it's a website, not really a program, but the stuff there is purchasable and downloadable, so it's close enough in my book!


PlasmaDesign.co.uk is the home to Rob Randtoul's amazing digital artwork, a very small sample (both in pixels and quantity) of which you see above this line. I first stumbled on Rob's work when looking for desktop images to fit my 1920x1200 screen; they were few and far between, until I found PlasmaDesign. In looking through the site, I was simply astounded by the quality and variety of the images, separated into Aqua, Landscape, and Abstract categories.

If you don't like computer-generated landscapes and images, you probably won't like much of what Rob has to offer (though I still think the Dew Drop image shown above is astonishing). But if you like such imagery, give the site a quick visit, and you might like what you see. There are a number of free images available; the £7.00 lifetime membership fee gets you access to his collection of widescreen images (up to 1920x1200), dual-screen images, and a bundle of images in OS X's screensaver format.

I realize there are literally hundreds of sites with tens of thousands of free desktop images out there, so why go somewhere that charges for their images? Well, Rob only charges £7.00 ($12.84 as of Friday's exchange rates) for a lifetime membership, and the quality of his work is, to me, well worth that small fee. New images are added regularly, and I continue to be impressed by Rob's amazing designs. Finally, having 1920x1200 images available saves me the time required to upsize smaller images (not to mention the resulting loss in quality).

As an aside, this week's PotW was heavily influenced by the fact that I've been busy updating the Mac OS X Hints book for the past couple of months ... which means I've been staring at lovely grayish or blueish neutral backgrounds for that whole time (the neutral backgrounds are used to take the literally hundreds of screenshots required for the book). But tonight, I wrapped up the final first-cut pass at the update, which means I'm once again able to enjoy Rob's artwork! Goodbye dull gray desktop!

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