Cool process, but honestly this wallpaper has looked dated from day one in my opinion. The fog, depth, etc. give it a very 2008 feel. By 2015, skeuomorphism was already out and flat designs were in. It's extra jarring surrounded by the rest of Windows 10 which has such a modern look.
Yes. Overusing light, shadow and smoke effects was done when those things were hard. Now, when they are cheap and commonplace, we have gone to find beauty in minimalism.
The piece doesn't become better because it was all done by hand. In fact, they kind of ruined it by cleaning it up so much that it looks like just another stock digital creation. If they had left it 'analog' looking, maybe it would have looked cool. Maybe.
Seems like someone needed to burn through a big budget and then come up with reasons why. As always, this needs a reference to the classic Pepsi logo design case.
> In fact, they kind of ruined it by cleaning it up so much that it looks like just another stock digital creation.
This was what disappointed me the most. They went to all that trouble to be able to take a photograph of a physical object then modified it so much that it ended up looking like a generic render from a Windows forum.
While the XP wallpaper is obviously iconic my personal favourites were the ones with Windows 7. They had many weird and wonderful ones in that collection :)
Right? Any of those photos that they composited together into the final would've been great, or to just release them as a collection of wallpapers. Instead they took them all and rammed them together into something that looked less interesting.
This is really a good demonstration of the law of diminishing returns relative to art. Sometimes less is more. A more complicated and weird process doesn't always, and in fact very rarely, increases the value of the output work.
Umm, is there something wrong with this? I find it very nice that the designers went to a length to explain their thought process. When I design logos as pure amateur (for fun) this is the sort of thought I put into it...
Having worked at ad and design agencies I am highly confident all of that deck has been back-ported onto the new logo to justify the large fee the client paid.
I can virtually guarantee a designer knocked up a few variants, the creative director said “Oh, this looks nice”, and they made up a long and on-brand pitch deck to send to the client.
Do you really think, just as a random example, the "gravitational pull of Pepsi" figure has any meaning? That the particular curve they've chosen has meaning? How about the individual arrows on it that presumably represent gravity?
Even worse is the timeline figure (page 19). It seems to suggest that if some of those historical events had happened on different dates then the exact measurements on the Pepsi logo would be different. Do you actually believe that? It's clearly complete bullshit.
Almost every single figure is contrived nonsense that reveals more about the authors' stupidity than the logo.
Theres a great talk from gmunk that goes into the inspiration and process for a lot of his projects. And some general good life advice for anyone that creates with a passion
Wow thought I was one of the few that did this. I much prefer a solid black ground since you can see all the icons and writing under them clearly. Also makes the screen darker and so softer on the eyes.
I do that too. On a new phone one of my first steps is to put my hand over the camera and take a picture--oddly enough, that seems to be the easiest way to get some black.
Scrolling down on web pages in the 90s made of tiny repeating textures and watching the renderer struggle to keep up with painting has instilled a deep fear of using extremely small images in tiling. What an icky feeling to find out your desktop may have some off-the-charts polygon count for its plain black background.
The neighboring comment is dead, but that is basically what Windows does IIRC. When you set it, it prerenders the image at the screen resolution and caches it.
I too prefer the purple + green lasers over the cold blue. AFAIK, the best you are going to get is the version they show off on the page like W10_Process_Beauty_r2.
1. Click on the logo that you prefer.
2. Right click -> save as
3. In windows explorer, right click on the image -> set as desktop background
Not a direct answer, but many image manipulation programs allow you to shift the hue, so you can have a red variant, a green one, etc. If one color is not enough, that's your chance to learn digital imaging techniques.
The image looks lo-res and full of noise regardless of screen resolution and color settings of any monitor I've seen. Why it required such complex engineering is a mystery... Not even talking about the quality of it as a graphic design/art work - just the technical aspect.
Windows handles wallpapers specially and always transcodes wallpaper images to JPEG (I think the default in Windows 7 was at 60% quality setting) even when the source image was PNG - or when a PNG version would be both smaller and have less errors than the JPEG version. There’s a registry setting you can tweak to change the quality and I think you can configure it to not transcode PNG images now - but I don’t think it’s the default.
As for the reason why - I think it’s to do with users using high-res photos (like 10megapixel) as wallpapers which would bog Windows down if used as-is - and users on roaming profiles causing a 10MB+ BMP image bring copied over the network every time they logon. Probably. I speculate.
Windows does something similar now too. It used to be that USER32 (which owned the windowing system/window manager since Windows 95) would render the wallpaper - but ever since a semi-recent release - either Windows 8 or Windows 10, Explorer.exe became responsible for rendering the wallpaper - and there's definitely some tie-in with the DWM too (you can see this because whenever you kill your session's explorer.exe your desktop wallpaper will disappear). I'm curious what goes on, exactly.
I think 'swapping' isn't quite the same (it implies whole teams being swapped, rather than members), but I agree that something like "swapping some members between teams" would be just as clear and less creepy.
Well, I appreciated this post! I’ve gone through random creative spurts, not for any reason what so ever, through arbitrarily long processes in the past. Glad to know it’s a “thing” and not just my neurons firing wrong!
Same here. I'm kind of shocked that it was not done by a single 3D CGI whiz in a week or two. It's corporate waste at its finest.
My second impression, watching the lead designer speak, is that his job is more than 50% about bullshiting. I.e. you design something that is passable, and then give an elaborate story, full of emotions and grandiose ideas, that make it easier for the decision makers to OK it - they in turn need the story to justify their decision (esp. if some higher ups question it later). Man, corporate world has so many people doing pseudo-work and playing out their bullshit roles in exchange for a comfortable middle-class life. I'm so glad I'm almost out.
I am living this life. I work in "UX" (read: turn this PSD into a web interface), thankfully in the engineering side more than the design side. I'm being paid way too much. I'm trying to get out of here because I realize this is a job where people are desperately trying to find problems to solve. Nothing is fulfilling about making a prototype of a context menu and watching researchers ask laypersons what their reaction is to it (yes this is real).
Much respect to you sir! It’s refreshing to see that your wallpaper wasn’t just created out of thin air by some photoshop guru. Loved seeing your process!
I'm not sure if 'overengineering' is the right term here.
Certainly in the world of modern art it's often all about process and little about the art itself.
But most people watching the result when they log into Windows don't know or care about this.
This could have been done by a single artist in a VFX software, art directed by gmunk.
But as they say: “If all you know is a hammer ...” ;)
This is the first desktop background I have seen that physically burned in and damaged a non-CRT flat screen monitor, this was because of the too-bright white elements.
Looks like this has now been corrected in the latest update.
I feel like I am missing something here. I see much more complex work on reddit by individuals (/r/highqualitygifs). And the final result is just an animation of a static logo with light show?
This is one of those projects that seems complex and expensive for the sake of being so. I doubt the final image is any better than what could have been created purely digitally. This would have been cool to see in the 1950s or 60s before CGI was a thing, but now it just seems over the top.
It's more so for the creative process. In my experience result is always better, more detailed when it has to go through progess and is built up. Rarely artist has "final image" in his mind when they start.
Sure, you could recreate this in GCI but it would be way harder to come up with the design in the first place.
I would also consider, any GCI artist could recreate this in 3D, but few could create it from scratch. If we consider that there was an good artist hired to do this piece, then it will be up to artist to choose his/her medium and you are critizing choice of artist or saying artist how to do his creative process and it is not about real vs GCI anymore.
Creating stuff from scratch is really really hard, it is always better to combine and build on things. The final product will look more original, detailed and overall better.
I'm pretty sure the concept was "light shining through windows" and then the marketing department started getting creative with ways to justify its existence.
I dunno, man. Microsoft has a bajillion dollars. I’d rather they waste it on inspired people doing technically interesting work with a ho-hum outcome than the other things that corporations waste money on (Microsoft included), like regulatory capture or figuring out ways to shirk responsibility for giving people cancer.
It's the same argument you here from the armchair critic of modern art, 'My child could do this.' And while it's right that a child could probably commit to the brush strokes, it's certain that if you gave the same tools to the child, they wouldn't produce anything like it.
And here, it's easy to say that you could easily produce this in CG using Blender and the like, if the artist knew what the final image would look like. But the final image is the product of the experimental process, which invited different possibilities to playing around with digital tools. An art teacher once told me, 'There's no right and wrong in art, just good and shit.' And 'good works of art', by my definition, tend to have a development process behind them, and not just whims of fraudulent genius, as some might believe.
That's what creative agency do. Create storytelling and meaning of what and why they do something the hard way. It's why there is still some company (e.g. Colossal Media) that hand-paint advertising on the building wall and not just easily print it on vinyl. It gives meaning to their creation - also differentiate them from the others.
In practical sense, yes, you can do it really fast, easy and cheap with any 3D software nowadays in just 2 days(but where's the fun in that?:) IMO, easily created things are also easily forgettable.
Another example is Apple and some of their recent desktop/iPhone wallpaper. It seems like CG, but those are real piece of art, made by hand, and photographed. Google's Material design concept, with real light and shadow, comes to mind too.
Seems overkill?, yes, but it did has story behind it and not cheaply made in 2 hours with Adobe illustrator.
The nonsense, abstract and intangibility part of it is what differentiate the brand. You will never see utilitarian brand like Amazon do something like this.
I would agree if something is noticeably handmade. For instance paintings on the sides of buildings, or street art, or hand animated logos etc. But I think 99% of people assume from looking at the desktop image that is was created digitally. There is no point in "creating the story" if you have to stumble across an obscure behind the scenes video to find out about it.
These projects are undertaken more for inspiration than synthesis of a design. It is unlikely something similar would have been drempt up, realty is more strange.
It’s not a case of which is better it’s a case of aesthetic. Models don’t necessarily look more real they just have their own look which adds to the film.
CG can certainly look excellent when the effort is put in (a lot is done on the cheap these days) but there is a time and a place for models if you want that feel.
Would be interested in seeing someone try to recreate the feel of models in CG though by literally modelling a model set/scale in CG.
Well no, it's not the same. I love when films use scale models to create effects, and I agree that sometimes they are better. But in this case they used a piece of glass with a projector behind it to recreate one of the simplest company logos, which could've been done in photoshop and after effects for half the time (and probably a 10th of the budget).
But yes, I love the Star Wars and LOTR (Wetaworks) stuff.
This process reminds me of the way that titles were made for Stranger Things. The creators wanted to go full out and have stop motion practical effects. They consulted with a guru of that era who said that CGI was the way to go. (1)
Microsoft Windows, and the people (like me) who use it, care deeply about beauty, craft, and design. I would expect no less from Microsoft, and this beauty can be seen throughout the design, operation, and usability of Microsoft software.
Sure, the effort is wasted on some, but the most important users love it.
It costs too much money for the quality of the result.
I've been lucky enough to know professional creative people who are very good at their jobs, and the one quality they share is the ability to produce work that is somehow reassuringly effective.
It's like they can give an audience the gift of just believing in what they do. There's no need for cynicism or questions - the work just works, and you can relax into it.
I don't think this is on that level. There's something awkward and self-conscious about it, so it doesn't quite gel or pop like it should. It's both too controlled and too messily out of control (lasers? acrylic? light projection? kitchen sink?) at the same time.
It's only about the money in the sense that there seems to have been a lot of it, and it's not obvious why.
I agree - It would be ridiculously easy to do this today with CG. Not just easy, but a few-magnitude-orders easy/fast. It kind of leaves a bad taste about the whole thing because most people don't know how easy it is to do in CG.
I could probably do this in an hour or two, including the fog (which really makes the image) - probably sounds condescending, but I cannot emphasize enough about the triviality of generating this wallpaper in CG. Most people don't realize what today's CG software can do, just look at the new features in Houdini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIcUW9QFMLE
Cool tech, yet every single one of those images look extremely unnatural.
I think people get used to seeing CGI so much they simply get used to it. Take the faces in frozen, they are intentionally stylized but in a way that looks utterly freakish. It’s not even that the animators messed up. Somehow rather than people seeing something deep in the uncanny valley most people simply don’t have a problem with this kind of distortion.
Sorry, I have to (insert lol emoji) a little. While I totally understand your point, GMunk is an insane artist, especially his artwork over the last 1.5 decades. Things move exponentially faster each year. I think large enterprise budgets (and approval processes) affect the creative output, especially when hiring someone like GMunk for a spot (esp in the corporate product space). He already favors a darker style than I can see a Windows campaign favoring. It’s definitely interesting when details of a process like this come out.
Same here, I do a lot of CG and I feel like taking on this project to show how trivial it is. Lol, what's the difference between recreating and creating?
If you really want to know, it was totally unfair dictatorial overreach. I got an email from dang:
> [original_posting] looks good, but didn't
get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so here: [repost_link].
> ... the software will give the repost an upvote from the mods, plus we'll make sure it doesn't get flagged.
> This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you have any questions, let us know. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.
As you can see, my posting started out with a whole one extra vote and thus the system was completely gamed. You were right :)
I don't see how this is worse than most other things that hit the home page. It's interesting, is an in-depth article, is tech-related, and is something most people recognize. And the fact that it's not just cgi is interesting, regardless of whether you think it should be or not.
This is just my personal opinion, but it looks more bullshit marketing speech than interesting technical content this article.
First part until the numbers is clearly marketing bullshit blabla: "the logo of windows (speaking in fact only of the wallpaper...) is the most important thing in the world, it saves kittens and perform heart surgery..."
Then, long text to say: we took a colored projector and black scotch and voilà.
No explanation of why it would be better than doing it digitally. And most of it, the technique is far from new and they did a very basic thing with it. Some people mix lights to create images and all.
My point is that if it was not related to something famous (Microsoft), no one would have cared
The email is real? That's a bit more interference than I would expect from HN moderators. You are basically letting your personal tastes govern what gets preferential treatment.
HN's archives contain tons of good articles that fall through the cracks because they didn't get noticed on /newest. Giving some of those a second chance is one way to make HN more interesting, which is what we try to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Another word for "optimization" might be "interference"—it depends on your perspective. Without intervention from moderators (plus software), HN's content would consist mostly of the same few hot topics over and over, plus sensational stories and riler-uppers. Unregulated, the system optimizes itself not for curiosity but for indignation. That alas is what mass psychology is wired for.
We try to be careful not to overdo it—our job is not to impose things on the community so much as to sense what it likes and provide more ways for it to have that. It's not our personal tastes that govern second-chance selections so much as our guess at what the community might find interesting. They get a brief placement on the front page. If we guess wrong, and the community doesn't find them interesting, they soon fall off. This post wasn't a wrong guess though—it was a rarer case where the community was split. Enough users liked it to upvote it to the top, while a bunch of other users didn't, and the thread contains comments from both camps.
You can see a partial list of second-chance posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are ones that were too old to put directly in the second-chance pool, so we emailed the submitter with a repost invitation instead. At some point we'll publish a more comprehensive list of all the stories that got given a second chance, but this one is representative.
The holy grail of all this is to build software for the community to do all this instead. That would be perfect because first, it would no longer be just moderators and story reviewers doing it, but anyone who wants to. And second, it would be way less work for us! So that's definitely the plan. What we still haven't come up with is a way to do it that isn't somehow just a reimplementation of the voting system—which HN has already got one of. One extra aspect of this is that when we get there, it should be a nice new way for users to earn karma on the site. The user who finds an old submission that the community turns out to love, will get karma for it, in addition to the submitter.
By the way, if you or anyone runs across a submission that is particularly good and didn't get attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the pool. We love getting these emails! Especially when they're something someone else posted and you just ran across it and found it interesting.
Instead of interference and preferential treatment, think of it as curation.
There are many times that interesting stories are submitted but never happen to hit the right window on /new to get upvoted onto the front page.
One of the things the mods look for is interesting articles that have been submitted by multiple people and still never made it to the front page. That is a sign that there may be community interest. My guess is that they have a script to find these articles, and then review them manually. Then they email the first person to have submitted it and ask them to re-submit.
Daniel (dang) explained this in more detail on another "second chance" article earlier today:
Thank you for your detailed reply!
I'm amazed to see that it is indeed really that the ranking system was gamed.
I was supposing that it was only a mix of bad algorithm and a lot of votes of windows or photography fanboys. Or something like that.
The ranking system wasn't really gamed. A single extra vote doesn't do much: it won't get you onto the front page, and it won't be a deciding factor in getting you there, either, at the hour this link was posted.
Throwing something back into /new isn't gaming the system, and there's no reason why 'dang shouldn't get a vote as well. At minimum it's curation, at maximum it's just a retry with 'dang upmodding it.
I say this as a person who read the post, didn't like it, thought about making a snarky comment about how the first time I saw it I thought the person's screen was covered in smudges, and refrained.
