frellwits

Desktop designing doesn’t seem to be an easy job for some people when they combine a horribly bulky theme with an extremely distractive wallpaper and some ugly icons on top of that. Maybe it’s my lack of understanding when I see some of these desktop screenshots, but in my world I can’t imagine how anyone would ever be productive in an environment like that. Therefore my first part in in this series of articles is about minimalism and consistency.

Keeping the consistency

To be more productive you need less distractions around you. Mac users are usally very well aware about this. Less bumps and less colorful distractions makes it a perfect system for productive media creation and designing, but now it’s not OSX and the minimalistic Mac hardware I’m going to talk about, it’s about customization (something that OSX and macs aren’t very good at.)

A good start when you begin to design your own desktop is to find the right theme consistency. Look at this simple blog for example (as of May 2009). Around you is nothing that can distract you from reading the text. It’s all simply arranged so that it focuses on the content. But how boring isn’t that you think? Look below the whole design and beyond the content. Small things like a gradient and the layout of the typography can add plenty of pleasant subconscious feelings. The key to make a great minimalistic theme is to add smaller details that doesn’t stand out too much. Consistency is about making every theme, wallpaper and application on your desktop to feel like one. Below I’m going to show a very bad and a good example of consistency.

This is a pretty stressful example. See how nothing flows in with the rest. Everything is bulky and stands out from the whole picture. It’s not relaxing to work with for several hours

This is a very peaceful example with very little or no distractions. The theme flows in with the wallpaper and applications. With this you can be productive.

When you keep the consistency throughout your desktop you need to be aware that mixing different styles in one can make plenty of distractions. Colors are a big bandit that you need to be very careful with. Never use yellow, red or orange in large quantities unless you want to produce a more stressful, “angrier”, or cheerful environment. Blue and green usally works as they do have a more tranquil and peaceful feeling which is supported in scientific tests.

Black and white are not colors. Black can be relaxing to your eyes on some screens but it can also make some people tired. Pitch white can make your head ache when there’s too much of it, the brightness can be overwhelming. But what about the grey in between? Grey can produce a feeling of dullness if it’s used in large quantities. So when you design a theme with grey buttons and scrollbars for example you should once more look what you can do with the smaller details to take some of that dullness away. Also remember that a soft color contrast and saturation is much more pleasant to your eyes than a harder one.

Less is more

The worst distraction on a desktop is usally the wallpaper and the icons. When you select your wallpaper I would recommend something that flows in with the rest of the theme, but there is also another thing you should think about – which is minimalism. For maximum productivity you should use a single color, but it’s a bit boring isn’t it? Good to know then that there are plenty of wallpapers that have very little distractions or a more peaceful feeling that can also make you productive and inspired. Most of the time you won’t see the wallpaper because of fullscreen applications, but sometimes it can be nice to minimize an application and just stare and get inspired by the wallpaper. Remeber that the wallpaper is never the main act on your desktop.

So when you design your own wallpaper you should not focus on making the whole picture stand out over the rest of the desktop consistency too much. The less you add on your wallpaper the more productivity the user will get out of it. The same goes with icons on your desktop. With less icons cluttering your interface you will find your documents easier within the applications themselves (or with a keystroke and search application like Launchy or Gnome-Do.) Compare it with a physical desktop that have plenty of documents cluttered all over the place with a clean desktop with the documents stored in categorized drawers instead. It will usally take some time for you to find the document you’re looking for on the cluttered desktop. Instead you may find another distraction like a Rubik’s Cube, or on your computer desktop a game for example. In my opinion the icon based desktop in Gnome, KDE and Windows are a big design mistake from the developers.

To wrap it all up in a few final sentences. Learn how to keep the consistency by observing a good minimalistic desktop from a cluttered one. When you design however I do not want you to be afraid to try new things, otherwise you’ll never develop your own style. If you think you’ve overdone something, don’t dismiss the whole idea, just focus on the smaller details and remove the bulkyness around it. Minimalistic design is all about finding a good consistency with tiny details.