[Bruce Achterberg]

For my wallpapers I like to find things that are symbolic. Sometimes I'll type up some text in Microsoft Paint and save that as my wallpaper. Sometimes I'll search for an image that I feel reflects something I want to think about or keep in mind. Generally, though, I try to find something that has a balance between being visually impressive and symbolic. If you go too far to either extreme the wallpaper usually ends up being either too dull or too lifeless.

Try to find something that feels good to you and you're satisfied with. There's nothing worse then having an image on your desktop that you'd rather not be looking at or constantly getting that you could have something better on there.

If you're looking for something to motivate you, ask yourself what you need motivation for. If it's something specific, get a wallpaper that has elements that represent that. If it's something more general, try to find a wallpaper image that represents something inspiring to you as a person, such as something you have a lot of respect for or something you can look up to. Maybe even something that represents an important value or theme to you, such as honour, courage, love, strength, wisdom, health/fitness, respect, etc.

I generally prefer to use wallpapers that are more targeted, though. I find it helps to keep me focused on what I'm currently dealing with in my life at the moment and every time I look at it I'm reminded of what the wallpaper represents to me. Basically my wallpapers act as a thought trigger -- I look at them and they activate some sort of thoughts. For that reason, I try to choose wallpapers that have either a calming or inspirational effect, such that even if I'm frustrated, distracted, apathetic, or something like that, catching a glance at my wallpaper can instantly improve my state and help me to re-focus on what’s important.

Usually I like to choose images that are fairly small in comparison to my monitor resolution -- maybe a quarter of the total size -- and centre it in the middle of the screen set against a black background. I find anything other then a black background is distraction and not very pleasant on the eyes (as in “ahhhh, the searing light, it burns!”). Sometimes I’ll use an image that takes up more size, but since I like to keep one row of shortcuts on my desktop on either side of my screen, anything too big makes it hard to see my shortcuts, which I dislike.

As for finding images, usually I make use of Google (either the normal search, and image search, or both, depending on how quickly I can find something that I’m satisfied with). Sometimes I may do some minor editing (such as cropping, combining two images into one, removing unwanted text, etc) to an image with Microsoft Paint before I use it as a wallpaper, but that’s pretty much all the editing work I’ll do since I’m not terribly skilled with Photoshop and I find it’s not really worth spending a lot of time working on wallpapers since I tend to change them every few weeks or so. I try to keep all of the wallpapers I use (I just put them in a folder called "Wallpapers"), but I rarely use the same one twice and prefer to have something new to look at.