Damn grid-based design is taking over.
I love organizational systems. I could geek out about designing hierarchies, making labels, and sorting for hours. And I love that a well-designed system doesn't have to be maintained... once you set it up, just make sure things are going in the right places, and you don't have to "clean" ever again.
Grids are a godsend. If you're designing a page (poster, book page, knitting pattern, whatever), you could spend hours fiddling with it and nudging things around to try to get something you like. With a grid, it's a lot more simple. Given some parameters, and placing elements becomes a lot more easy. Especially when looking at a lot of information, grids make it simpler to find what you want and "make sense" out of everything.
And so, combining the two ideas, I quite like the idea of a gridded desktop. Most desktops you see are a mess, some photo or artwork that you can't make out for all the icons and bookmarks scattered across it. I've been a "desktop minimalist" for a long time, I'll put up a photo and a shortcut for my browswer/documents. That's it. Recently I expanded to having a couple of shortcuts to projects that I've currently got in the works, but only one or two.
I was inspired by Sarah France's Six Grid Desktop. I like to have a photo to look at, I didn't really need a logo (duh, I know it's a grid desktop), and I wanted fewer categories. So I made my design with that in mind. Thirds-based, the left section for an image frame, the center third for shortcuts, and the right third for my files.
Here's mine currently. The yarn photo is just a crop of a high-res image I had saved from somewhere. I plan on changing it out periodically.
And here's one with a blank frame. Use your favorite image editor to put in your own photo and change the category names. Enjoy!
Post a Comment 2 comments:
The logo was purely to show support to The Grid System and to help promote my website.
The idea was to release it and allow others to adapt it - and the logo was merely to communicate what it was they were actually downloading.
Your desktop looks good, I love the use of image and cropping.
My current version has an image of my nephew in the background with the grid over the top subtle but worth it.
March 24, 2009 at 9:10 AM
Simple, elegant and totally rock!
I like and will draw up one for my laptop. Thanks!
April 27, 2009 at 7:02 AM