1 new wallpaper (Kino no Tabi - Orange Explosion)

1 new wallpaper:
Kino no Tabi - Orange Explosion (Pop Art)

What better way to celebrate DA!'s 7th birthday than with a wallpaper from my favorite series? ...I liked the pose of Kino and the more pop-art American comicbook styling of the image, and started to trace it, but never got very far with it. Recently I decided to finish it once and for all...[more]

7 year retrospective

It's official: DA! Desktop Anime is now 7 years old. That's a scary thought. I mean, this website's old enough to hit the second grade! How many websites run by a single person on their spare time do you know of that's been updated monthly for seven years?
This site is older than Wikipedia. It's even older, by a few months, than that other "DA" site, DeviantArt.
What a wild ride it's been. When I started this site I had just begun my first year of undergrad. Netscape was a cool browser. We had just learned there was something called "CSS" that was supposed to get rid of those <font> tags for once and for all. I really, really liked Fushigi Yuugi and Pretear.
Now, I've got my Master's degree and a lovely job at Google, Netscape has disappeared almost entirely into a footnote in history of the Mozilla project. New buzzwords like AJAX and RSS are making the rounds. I have almost completely stopped watching any anime series, except for a rare few (Nodame Cantabile and Mushishi, namely.)
But don't start getting up! The captain has NOT turned off the seatbelt sign. I don't plan on stopping any time soon, so you'd better hang on because I'm toasting to another seven years of hearty wallpaper goodness.
Because some time ago (it's been long enough that I stopped counting the time gone by) I made it a tradition to grace DA! with a new layout once a year on its birthday. So here you go. Enjoy the Zen goodness of version 9, which includes a lot more ways of finding wallpapers. I dumped the ratings, which never felt like they were doing anything for the site, and added links to the wallpapers on Minitokyo and AnimePaper. I also added all the widescreen versions of walls I made this past year. Because dammit, widescreen is wiiiiiiiiide. And very, very good.

Happy Birthday, my dear little website.

Server back

...and it's back up.

Server down

And not in a scheduled maintenance sort of way either.
Server admin thinks it should be back up Wednesday noonish PDT.

Server Migration complete

Looks like the migration is complete and everything's working again!

Server Migration

My wonderful host, GeoFront WebHosting, is going to be moving servers today, with the regularly associated downtime for the move and testing to make sure everything was transferred properly.
This affects all of my sites hosted by GeoFront (DA!, DAA!, Clearly Pixelated and Vectorage).
I'll update this when I get word that everything has been moved over and is working again.

3 new wallpapers (Aa! Megamisama, Okami, Idolmaster)

3 new wallpapers:

Aa! Megamisama - Heavenly Dance (Vector/Abstract)

I wanted to go back to the walling styles from the early 2000's, and emulate Cynical126's popular formula - clean scan, soft gradients, abstract background, and sparkling bubbles... [more]

Okami - Samurai Snakes (Vexture/Minimalistic)

I just love Okami artwork, and have been wanting to make a wall for it for quite some time. It took a while to figure out what to do, though... [more]

Idolmaster - iDOL (Vector/Scenic)

I have actually been wanting to make an Idolmaster wall since Dom kept contending that the Go My Way dance could be interpreted as football referee signals... [more]

What's in a resolution?

Wallpaper resolution is a tricky thing. There are so many different sizes of monitors out there nowadays that it's hard to design for all of them. Generally, you just crop things to the right aspect ratio, which does mean you have to be careful about element placement.
I have a dual widescreen monitor display at work, and generally speaking, this is a rare thing to find. So every so often I make one for myself.
The question was, how do I make this wall look good on dual screens and single screens?
The answer: Move elements around.
I made two wallpapers here: a dual monitor version, and a single monitor version, and then cropped them to fit the relevant aspect ratios.
Dual monitor versions:




Single monitor versions:




It makes a difference, doesn't it?

Useful resource for typography

Thanks to the Google Personalized Homepage's new "Recommendations" feature, I found the following website:
Identifont
It allows you to either
a) Look up a font face by name
b) Look up a font by distinguishing features

B is time-consuming as it asks you to examine all the details possible on the font - the style of the lowercase 'g' or uppercase 'K', or how many lines are in a $, etc.
I haven't tried it out on any fonts in particular, but it looks extensive and possibly quite powerful, if you're trying to figure out a font someone else has used - or at the very least find something of a similar vein.

In either case, it'll return a graphic of the font (showing alpha characters) as well as information on the font and where you might be able to purchase it.

Nifty!

Walling Games

It's been a bit quiet at DA! That's because I've been hard at work on Round 2 of which?waller, which is a walling guessing game I'm running (and participating in) at Minitokyo. The idea of the game is to submit wallpapers anonymously, and then people have to guess who made each wall. It's an exercise in recognizing wall styles, trends, and just to have fun with a walling competition that doesn't have the typical pressures of creating something for a panel of judges.
If you're a member of Minitokyo, I encourage you to check out the game and try your hand at guessing.
Otherwise, you'll see what I made when round 2 ends next week!