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Windows 10 Desktop: Physically building and photographing the logos (2015)
- Tempest1981 7y agoMuch more work than I expected. How can I replace my tired light-blue Windows logo with the red/magenta logo they show? I like the richer colors.
- theklr 7y agoI don’t think they ever publicly released the other colors...or my hunt has been piss poor
- Kwpolska 7y agoThe closest thing would be the box for Windows 10 Pro, which had a purple recolor of the final wallpaper.
- slacka 7y agoI 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
- Tempest1981 7y agoCool, thanks! Now I just need to eradicate the plain blue version on the bootup screen.
- noisem4ker 7y agoNot 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.
- laserDinosaur 7y agoThe images in section 4 of the article are actually 2560x1920 images you can download: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5bf94ef89317938c80bbd02137fc5c819fb84c4263d6ecbd835e184fb1317332/W10_Process_Beauty_r2.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5bf94ef89317938c80bb...
- discordance 7y agoA background for 1 billion - 1 The first thing I do in Windows is replace the background image with a solid black
- Thorentis 7y agoWow 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.
- frank2 7y agoMy Windows 10 desktop is solid black, too. In contrast my Mac's desktop is solid white (and almost always empty).
- firethief 7y agoI 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.
- onep1x3l 7y agoI just create a 1x1 pixel png, black, of course, and it does the job.
- Lucent 7y agoScrolling 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.
- Kwpolska 7y agoI would expect the OS to just scale the image to screen size once when it boots (or whatever) and cache that image.
- Thorentis 7y agoThis 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.
- snagglegaggle 7y agoThese 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.
- Aloha 7y agoI had always assumed it was digitally created.
- EsssM7QVMehFPAs 7y agoIndustrial Light and Magic would like to disagree, where Star Wars spaceships are still built in miniature model glory. CGI is still not the same. Yet.
- Thorentis 7y agoWell 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.
- whywhywhywhy 7y agoIt’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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- parsd 7y agoThe 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoWindows 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.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoHKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\JPEGImportQuality -> 100
- Razengan 7y agomacOS has been using 10-bit 5K wallpapers worth tens of megabytes at full quality for years now.
- colejohnson66 7y agoBut they cache them as a GPU texture, don’t they?
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoWindows 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.
- system2 7y agoI 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?
- ajflores1604 7y agoTheres 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 https://youtu.be/F93CP8UjRxk https://youtu.be/F93CP8UjRxk
- Stratoscope 7y agoThis reminds me of the old BBC and RTF Television logos: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/05/when-tv-logos-were-physical-objects/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/05/when-tv-logos-were-ph... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14391993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14391993
- greatgib 7y agoSo useless and not interesting! How did this finish first on HN compared to more interesting topics?
- iudqnolq 7y agoIf 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 :) /s [edit: email is real]
- shaklee3 7y agoI 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.
- iudqnolq 7y agoThat's what I thought, and why I posted it.
- bdcravens 7y agoBut where will tomorrow's WeWork, Uber, and Elon bashing articles go? /s
- greatgib 7y agoThis 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
- _bxg1 7y agoCool 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.
- sfjailbird 7y agoYes. 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.
- deaddodo 7y ago> As always, this needs a reference to the classic Pepsi logo design case. Context?
- function_seven 7y agoOh man you’re in for a treat. https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
- Dylan16807 7y agoIt's inspiring, really... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qImHuiYnVQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qImHuiYnVQ0
- imron 7y agoThat's..... incredible. I guess the design company had to justify their payment somehow.
- cwilby 7y agoSuper interesting, didn't know they physically built that. The purple Windows logo is a wallpaper candidate even without Windows!
- pupdogg 7y agoMuch 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!
- kccqzy 7y agoSomeone should try to use a raytracer and other software to recreate the image to see how it compares with a purely digital version.
- ianai 7y agoWell, 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!
- prvc 7y agoThose clips could be outtakes from the TV show Silicon Valley.
- fuzzfactor 7y agoThis 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.
- Jonnax 7y agoLCD or OLED?
- fuzzfactor 7y agoA Dell 24 inch LCD over 10 years old which was in perfect shape, originally about a $1000 monitor. Works fine but you can still see the pattern with some graphics or backgrounds, and it only burned in for a few dozen hours before I noticed it.
- deith 7y agoAm I the only one that thinks this is just absolutely crazy and a complete waste of money and time?
- burntoutfire 7y agoSame 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.
- wildrhythms 7y agoI 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).
- pcdoodle 7y agoCool but hard to care about when the OS itself sucks so bad.
- IshKebab 7y agoNot sure what you're talking about. Windows 10 itself is an excellent OS. The only real problem with it is all the adverts.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zackkatz 7y ago> with Picard and Munkowitz wife-swapping the teams to keep things moving and the team extra productive There’s a way you could say the same thing without being weird. “Swapping” would have sufficed!
- JadeNB 7y agoI 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.
- virtualritz 7y agoI'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 ...” ;)
- EvanAnderson 7y agoI am reminded of the epic HBO "Feature Presentation" intro (insofar as it was physically constructed): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng
- Tempest1981 7y agoHere's some logo history: (Win 1.0, 3.1, XP, Vista, Win 8 Metro style) https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2012/02/17/redesigning-the-windows-logo/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2012/02/17/redes...
- rolibote 7y agoThis 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 https://bbwtube.porn/ https://bbwtube.porn/ .