Glassy
A luscious and playful wallpaper collection.
Introducing Glassy, a vibrant new wallpaper collection for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
If you'll let me get all softhearted and mushy for a minute, this wallpaper meant a fair bit for me to make. Throughout the tail end of 2023 and the start of 2024, the pressures at work continued to mount. Significant staffing shortages coincided with pressures from leadership to remain busy at all costs or face the potential of job cuts overwhelmed me. Work and a surge in family stress began to chip away: work by day and family by night. Then, a wave of illness levelled me for several weeks, which meant that when I finally returned to the office, the pent-up demand had grown significantly. With each passing day, the degree of burnout I felt increased.
I've felt burnt out before; that wasn't the primary worry. The problem was that my creativity and passion for creating were obliterated for the first time in a long time. This site became a nuisance, one more thing that demanded my increasingly finite time, energy, and attention. I had a few entries that I had stockiled and released, but through most of January and February, I had gone into a creative hibernation. I struggled with generating ideas that had previously flowed naturally, and devoting time to design felt laborious. Nothing seemed easy; nothing sparked joy.
Glassy is the first wallpaper in months that I genuinely enjoyed creating. It started with an old project I had intended to start months ago using Motter Tektura, an old typeface Apple used in the late 1970s and into the 1980s (fun fact: the 'bite' in Apple's logo was designed to match the curvature of this typeface's lowercase a). I had toyed with creating a wallpaper using this old typeface and tried to give it a fun, retro flair. Nothing was working, and everything I tried made me hate the project more and more. Eventually, as I played around, a slip of the cursor here and an accidental border there began to create something that looked oddly satisfying. The design became something of a playground for me, a distraction from all the shit going on at home and with work, and I began to have fun creating. I can't pledge that I'm through to the other side of this burnout, but this wallpaper gave me a sliver of hope that I'm through the worst of it.
What stands out in Glassy is the sense of play that shines through these wallpapers, an abstract and vibrant collage of shape, reflection, and shadow. Apple fans may recognize the colour palette as a gradient of Apple's six colours in their old logo. At the same time, the Easter egg embedded in the lines and curves of each wallpaper is that all are composed of slices of the word 'apple' in the old Motter Tektura typeface.
The full vector text I created from which sections were carved to create each of the four wallpapers in this collection.
I've created four different wallpapers for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. And each looks stunning on every device. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
Downloads
Glassy I
iPad | Mac | iPhone | iPhone Alt
Glassy II
Glassy III
Glassy IV
Note: You may notice that on iOS devices the wallpaper dims or changes brightness ever so slightly from the Lock Screen to the Home Screen. This is a characteristic/quirk of the current iOS. I’ve done my best to mitigate it.
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If you enjoy my work (the articles, the wallpapers, my general demeanour… anything really), consider leaving a tip & supporting the site. Your support is incredibly appreciated & goes a long way to keep this site and the works I produce ad-free & free of charge.
