smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’m trialling a lack of a graphical desktop background. More specifically, I’m experimenting to see how colour might affect productivity or perhaps more importantly, creativity.

Like a blank sheet of paper, I have virtually nothing on the desktop, save two AIR applets¹ a small number of “in use” folders² and a small mac-like applet bar bottom-centre.

The background colour is #2c333b which seems to help improve the contrast with desktop elements.

This means, every time I return to the PC, I have a blank slate to work with. Applications, when not in use will be kept in a minimised state, to help ‘control’ what can become an entirely unruly state-of-affairs under Microsoft’s Windows XP platform.

I do seem to be one of few Windows user’s who persists in placing the start menu up top — this is not because I chose to mimic OS X, rather it’s simply a far more logical location versus the default bottom. Given file menus and tool bars exist at the top of any window, it makes sense to put the parent task bar & start menu close for reduced mouse movement in turn.

I’ve done that as a general rule since Windows 95, on any system I use. It’s been a quirk as such for something like 12 years now. I still have work colleagues commenting³ on my “weird” behaviour⁴.

Having past forty-eight hours now, since blanking the slate, I really do not miss having some kind of imagery as much as I thought I would. In fact it’s proving to be quite a pleasant change. Because the background has no noise, as it were, I find any icons finding their way to the desktop are expunged with extreme prejudice.

Which has also caused me to massively increase the use of Colibri, something that was unexpected yet most welcome.

Being the curious sort, what does your “electronic work space” look like? Does it reflect your needs, or wants instead?

In fact, I’d love to check out how you “view the foo” — if you have a moment, send me an email with a screen shot⁵ or link⁶ to your desktop shot, perhaps with a little local flavour, with your location, time taken and I’ll post a follow up article with the results.

Update:

Responses are starting to come in, Rob Mientjes sent in the following:

I’m rather minimal as well. I just have too many URL “temporary bookmarks” in the Dock..

Keep them coming, it’s amazing to see such diverse desktops.

1. two applets that I use frequently, otherwise they too, would be removed (↩)
2. which are moved off the workspace once complete (↩)
3. some don’t actually realise it’s possible to move the start bar (↩)
4. I swear Microsoft Operating Systems ‘dumb’ people down (↩)
5. via camera or screen grab, it’s up to you (↩)
6. e.g. hosted on flickr (↩)