Oh noes! Another one! And one of my favourite pieces on top of that. This reminds me of the days when I was called the “maniac of PNG”. Again, another sign of the times as almost everybody uses it now. This format almost replaced GIF in all the situations where GIF was used before. I think we call that a victory (in fact, I think it’s due to Internet Explorer 6 successors increasing market share starting from 2007 and the release of IE7 which finally introduced full alpha transparency support with PNG, without using any DX transformation plug-in).

Another very easy case because almost everything was in vector form (I had to convert only a few things). The tricky part was more the restricted composition by itself, which didn’t allow playing much when having headroom. Hence my decision to offer one more resolution, targeted for both SXGA (1280×1024) and WXGA+ displays (1440×900).

About the wallpaper, it just looks so great it’s unbelievable. I could almost have made it now. I can’t remember what inspired me to do it at the time. All I can say is that I was doing a two-year technical degree in IT at the time (yes, I’m way older than you think).

And now, the beast (click on thumbnails for original size):

– 2K format (2560×1600)

– FHD format (1920×1200)

– For older small widescreen and standard monitors (1440×1024)

– HD format (1366×800)

– SD format (1024×600)

In case you didn’t notice it, there’s a good reason why it’s monochrome. This way it can compress as efficiently as it was greyscale, but instead uses a 256-colour palette made of shades of one colour. I think nobody other than me can produce such PNGs without messing up (palette must be kept in order and compression must be made with filter 5, using Ken Silverman’s pngout for example).