Ancient Reflection Desktop

Today’s featured desktop doesn’t seem like much more than a wallpaper and some text, but behind the simplicity is actually some clever dock, icon, and GeekTool customisations.

This desktop belongs to deviantART user dracoamericanusfusco. He took this wallpaper (download mirror) and overlaid a very simple, text-based bar at the bottom. While we don’t have specific instructions from dracoamericanusfusco, this is actually pretty easy to do.

For the dock, you need to make it transparent. Here are some instructions for manual modification, but if you’re running OS X 10.5 or earlier — yes, 10.5 or earlier, so not 10.6 — you can use Unsanity’s ClearDock utility. Next, you’ll have to create the text based icons you see on the screen. This is easy to do with a sans-serif font of your choice and a graphics editor like Photoshop. (If you need help, here’s a tutorial and video walkthrough on how to make custom OS X icons.) Once you’ve done that, just change your application icons to the ones you created.

That’s really the hardest part. The rest is likely a simple GeekTool customisation, although the current music player could possibly be a product of Bowtie as well.

Ancient Warrior [dracoamericanusfusco on deviantART]