Blog Post

I love wood grain and I love black, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I semi-accidentally ended up with a living room full of wood (or fake wood) furniture and a lot of black devices. In early 2025, I thought it would be cool to go even further and throw together some wood grain desktop wallpapers to use with my PC in dark mode, so my digital desktop would perfectly fit my physical desktop.

(My desk is a bit of a mess right now, so maybe I'll add a photo here some other time.)

Since I'd recently bought an OLED monitor, I wanted the wallpapers to be dark, and since I had been messing around with Linux, I wanted one that had the logo and default colour of the distro I was using the most; Tuxedo OS. (This dark red KDE wallpaper I was using for a while was a big inspiration).

I followed a tutorial on how to create a wood burn effect in Photoshop and applied it to some OS logos. I'm not surprised to say that I got more than a little carried away after that; making a bunch more colours and logos, including for OSes I don't even use. I even made some vertical ones for mobile. The day after I got especially carried away with making wallpapers, I got just as carried away with tweaking my phone's home screen icons to match.

I didn't take as much care as I should have in making sure that the wood grain texture was free to use because I was only going to make a couple for myself originally and not share them. I did my due diligence afterwards and couldn't find a definitive source for the texture. I found it with an image search that links to a blogger page that no longer exists, and a reverse image search didn't reveal much either. Most of the search results claimed that it's a "free" texture, so I'm just going to assume that it's okay to use for a small project like this. In the extremely unlikely chance that the person that made or owns it stumbles upon this page, feel free to contact me.

The appreciation for the black and wood setup I have previously led me to upgrading my PC case to a Fractal North XL. In my tradition of giving my PCs names, I renamed my PC to Juniper, after both the tree and the Pokémon character (Get it? Because she's in Pokémon Black? Hehe.). I've seen builds with this case that use wood grain vinyl decals to add logos and accents (like this and this), and I was thinking about doing something like that, but simpler and in the shape of a Juniper tree, so I also made a wallpaper with a Juniper (or Juniper-like) tree icon instead of an OS logo. I'm not too sure about the rights to the tree icon, so I'll keep that wallpaper to myself for now.

Anyway, that's enough babbling from me. You can find download links to most of the wallpapers I've made in this style so far below. Click on a thumbnail to view/download one in full 3840x2160, or click the text link to download them all in one .zip file.