Rancho At Night
A wallpaper based on a joke that got taken way too far goes even further—introducing Rancho at Night.
The sequel to a wallpaper I thought I'd never make gets a fresh and beautiful new look with the addition of a gorgeous new night mode variation. Before you scroll down and get to the goods, let me tell you about it.
OS X Rancho Cucamonga
Download the daytime version of Rancho Cucamonga here
Reception
One of the unique aspects of the social internet is how something can begin as a lighthearted joke but take on an entire life of its own. In this case, joking about the potential names for macOS ahead of WWDC23 brought back old clips of when Apple joked about Rancho Cucamonga as a potential next California-named destination for macOS. That led to a post, which led to me creating a full-blown wallpaper after the quick AI image I posted garnered such a positive reception. Honestly, the responses I received from people blew me away:
“I've never used any custom wallpapers on my devices before. I've only ever used system wallpapers. However, I came across your website and was immediately impressed, especially by the wallpapers. They are all just amazing. So I put them, currently Rancho Cucamonga, on my devices. Thanks for your amazing work and keep it up!”
“As a former resident of Rancho Cucamonga for almost a decade, your recent creation resonated with me on a personal level. It brings back cherished memories of my time there, and I wanted to show my appreciation by leaving this tip."
Appreciate how hard it is to shift a default wallpaper user to embrace third-party wallpapers! That'll be etched into my tombstone for sure! But sure enough, as soon as Rancho came out, people were pressing for a night version of the wallpaper. And so that brings us to the present moment.
PRocess
First came selecting a colour palette for Rancho by Night. I experimented with a few variations, including more abstract palette combinations (keeping the sand yellow but darkening the sky and mountains), to variations on shades of blues, purples, and red. Ultimately, I settled on a colour combination closely inspired by the night mode version of macOS Mojave. Keeping the project constrained to a monochrome look using deep indigo blues created a peaceful and calm compliment to the original Rancho Cucamonga wallpaper.
The not-so-fun challenge that arose after that was essentially redesigning everything without touching anything. I don't often build my wallpaper with a dark version in mind (I probably should), but layers often look, operate and interact very differently when new colours, gradients, and tweaks are made to them. The paradox becomes that I need to change things to make it seem like nothing was changed besides the time of day. It is an annoying process. I also discovered that things that look good in Light Mode look off when in Dark Mode, requiring careful adjustments. In the most extreme example, I removed one of the mountains in the distance because it wasn't cooperating with the night sky.
You can see the banding that formed in the unedited export of this image. The exposure has been bumped up a bit to exaggerate the banding.
Then came the banding. Another "delightful" byproduct commonly appearing in darker wallpapers is the emergence of banding. When I exported early drafts, the banding, especially towards the middle centre of the wallpaper, was ruining the image. And when I tried to fix the issue, it repaired one problem but created others: blurring stars, muddying up other layers, and dissolving contrasts between the mountain peaks. So the solution to that problem was to export the image in pieces. I exported individual layers from Sketch and reassembled them in Pixelmator like a puzzle. This hack job workaround allowed me to apply the debanding to the problematic layers while preserving the rest. And now you know why my eye twitches when people say I should make a night mode of something.
Rancho at Night
The final result is a beautiful compliment to the original Rancho wallpaper, and one that I hope people enjoy. The wallpaper is available for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with versions available with and without the tree. Lastly, there's also a .heic file for the Mac that automatically changes from day to night when the Mac is in light and dark mode. Enjoy!
Tree: iPad | 6K | MacBook Pro 16 | iPhone
w/o Tree: iPad | 6K | MacBook Pro 16 | iPhone
Dynamic Day/Night w/ Tree: 6K | MacBook Pro 16
Dynamic Day/Night w/o Tree: 6K | MacBook Pro 16
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