Happy New Year! Here’s hoping that 2021 is significantly kinder to us than 2020 was. To get back into the swing of things (I’ve just enjoyed a 2-week vacation and I need to find my groove again), let’s take another look at DeskScapes 11!

I gave a little preview of the upcoming version of Deskscapes just before our holiday break, but today I want to focus on something a little more specific within the app: designing your own backgrounds (Dreams). 

There are plenty of ways to go about this. You can start with a totally blank slate or you can choose an existing background to modify. I pulled up a blank page and chose a static image I happened to have on my desktop - in this case, a screenshot from Final Fantasy XIV - and decided to start exploring some of the options.

First I just started playing with some of the provided effects. I chose some ripples (rings on water) and clicked around to explore some of the options. With all of the effects, you can change shape, size, speed, and so on to make it work for your image in any way that you want. I also tested the playlist feature by uploading a song.

After playing around in effects, I moved into animations - and there were a ton of choices. I played with them for a bit, experimenting with resizing/relocating where the effects pop up on my background. With this particular effect, I can adjust the angle that the stars are falling at, as well as the speed, size, and density, which I thought was pretty cool.

I got caught up in exploring all of the different effects for a while, I won’t lie. There are a lot of cool things that I can add to my background to make it unique and fun. In the image below, I added some snowflakes and pumped their size up a lot so that I could see them really well. I also eventually adjusted it so that they fell really slowly.

You can also adjust the color on most effects! I played around with the fireworks effect and tried colors from green all the way to purple, adjusting the main color, glow, and translucency to see all different sorts of variants.

If you don’t have a pre-existing image that you want to add effects to and make into a DeskScapes Dream, you can select one that’s already in the app. I played around with this dragon background a bit; it was actually really helpful to see all the layers of what the artist had already added to it so I could get better ideas of how to formulate my own the next time I try from scratch.

As you can see, DeskScapes 11 makes creating your own animated background really easy and straightforward! I am not particularly artistic, so having an easy to navigate program with pre-created effects and animations really helps me out and makes me want to play with customization more than I might normally otherwise.

Are you excited about the new DeskScapes? What features are you hoping to see in DeskScapes 11? Share with me!