It's getting close to that time of the year again when Opera innovates the web. In anticipation of that, I just wanted to share this little thingybingy I made for fun. Who knows, maybe it'll turn into a nice t-shirt someday?
I have recently played a bit with a really simple technique in Photoshop that produce very cheesy results. As you can see above. The principle is simple; you take one nice pose (photo or drawing, it really doesn't matter), gather some brush strokes (not too complicated, and preferrably with a decent resolution), some more complex filler shapes (experiment) and some ambient background shapes (smoke works very nicely) and free transform outlines and fills piece by piece until satisfied. See video:
It has taken me almost a year, but now it is starting to look awesome. I think there are quite a pile of bugs yet to fix, but I simply cannot hold this back any more now. The skin is inspired by the Internet Channel of the Nintendo Wii, but adopted to fit the desktop. Among things needed to be done, was to create new icons. All together, some 250 unique icons were made, and this has taken some time.
Replacing icons reveals some funky cheats used in the default skin, and anticipate my icons not working 100% in all contexts. Some icons are reused a number of places, and if the new icon does not have the same ambiguity as the default one weirdness probably will occur.
A default Opera setup should work nice with this skin, but please make sure that the "Panel Toggle" is active. (Tools - Appearance - Panels - Panel Toggle checbox). Also, I recommend enabling the "Personal Bar" and showing images only (View - Toolbars - Personal Bar, right click on the Personal Bar - Customize - Style - Images only).
Enough talk, click the image to get to the real deal. And please leave a comment. Cheerio!
Suddenly I got visitors, and I was lingering around in my underwear! Something had to be done to occupy my guests, but what? A cute kitten, perhaps? Yes! Definetely!
Here, most honored guest. Have a cute kitten:
Click on the image to get a 1600x1200px wallpaper. Click here to get a 1284x1024px wallpaper. Nag me for other sizes, or do the scaling yourself.
Being a big fan of Opera, but hating our logo is frustrating. To let off steam, I tend to play with it and sometimes the results are interesting. Here's a late take:
I quite like the simplicity of it, allthough the white outer line probably isn't the best idea. Unless the background comes with it, of course. Hm.
Taking cues from big corps forcing DRM on their users, I've come up with a little scheme to secure my pension: (Open the image to read the fine print.)
I will hang this up all around, with a little box to store the money. Then people will have to give me their money each time they read the poster.
I felt like making a new wallpaper today, so i found a crappy image with Google image search and played with it a bit. Of course I had to do a take on the Opera logo again; my imagination runs on a really empty tank these days.
For those interrested, I removed the really nasty jpeg artifacts in Photoshop with Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise..., then scaled the image up really much (to 1600x1600px) and ran a Filter > Blur > Lens Blur and added some monochrome gaussian noise as well as some blur. I then swapped the red and blue channels and tweaked the colors some more to get the blue color a nice red one. Not happy with the texture, I overlayed the painted area with a wooden high-res texture. On top of that I added a slight bevel/emboss layer effect and another vague texture.
The Shadow is just a horizontally motion blurred oval shape repeated a couple of times with some different scaling to imitate the shadow getting fainter away from the cube. I burned the bottom edges of the cube and copied the whole thing, flipped it around vertically and masked it with a gradient and removed that part to make a nice reflection. For the background I simply made a radial gradient with a center below the block.
See the attached psd file if you would like to tweak or play with this. Have fun! Wallpaper_Block_O.psd
Tired of that ugly default Opera Icon on your desktop? Hey! You haven't hidden it alltogether, have you? No matter, because today you can do your computer a favor and replace it with something far better. I give to you the pimped O!
Simply save this shiny Logo in .ico format somewhere you'll find it again, say in your Opera installation folder or something, and replace it for that fugly default one. In Windows, you simply right click on the desktop icon, select 'Properties' and 'Change icon...'. Find the newly saved icon and voila! Shinyness shines upon ya!
drop_ie.svg
Big version if you right click and open image
Something had to be done to occupy my guests, but what? A cute kitten, perhaps? Yes! Definetely! 
June 2009August 2009
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