Category Archives: Downloads

Happy New Year + New January Wallpaper!

Hey, friends! I’m aliiiive!

2014 was an interesting year, and at the same time, I didn’t really talk much about it. It’s always challenging to find the right balance between recording/reflecting on your life and actually living it, and this past year I obviously spent much more time doing the latter. As much as I advocate for living in the present moment and not overthinking things too much (despite what my Twitter bio might say), there’s also something nice about sharing parts of your life with others. So, with that said, you’ll be seeing more of me around the ol’ Interwebs in 2015. Hurray!

First off, I’m excited to restart my monthly wallpaper series! I really enjoyed doing making them in 2013 and was happy to see them all over my friends’ devices. Here’s the brand spankin’ new wallpaper for January, sized for computers, tablets and mobile phones:

January wallpapers for desktop, tablet and mobile by Dara Skolnick

Download

Desktop (2560 x 1440) • Tablet (2048 x 2048) • Mobile (640 x 1136)

Now that you have a shiny new wallpaper for the shiny new year (too cheesy? too bad), here a few highlights from this past year:

  1. This was my first full calendar year being self-employed! I kind of forget what having a “real” job is like, and I’m pretty okay with that.

    I spent approximately a zillion hours here.

    I spent approximately a zillion hours here.

  2. I finally took a real vacation. I somehow forgot to do this in 2013, which was silly because overworking yourself ad infinitum is a good idea for precisely no one. This past June, I spent a little over a week in Italy — home of amazing art, architecture, gelato, and, surprisingly, delicious gluten-free food.

    Street art in Italy

    Italy is known for its fine art, but did you know that it’s also full of great street art?

  3. I gave a talk at a conference for the first time. This past November I spoke at WordCamp Toronto about levelling up your WordPress development workflow and it went really well. I can’t wait to speak again some time!
     

    Here’s what some nice people had to say at the time:

    Speaking of which, if there’s a WordCamp coming up in your area, you should totally go — in my slightly biased opinion, it’s totally worth it.

Now, all that’s not to say that 2014 was the perfect year — after all, life is life and not-so-great things happen. That being said, on balance, things are pretty, pretty, pretty good.

I hope you’ve all had a great year and I wish you all the best for this upcoming one!

Last monthly wallpaper: December!

wallpapers-december

And, here we are! The year’s almost over, and my monthly wallpaper series is now at an end. I’m sorry I’m late in getting it out this month, but I started December off with some mysterious fevery sickness, and sleeping all day and drinking massive amounts of tea seemed like a better idea than making a wallpaper at the time. This wallpaper is a bit different from the rest of the series because it’s predominantly dark, but that suits December perfectly since this is the month that contains the shortest day of the year (aka the Winter Solstice).

Usually I use old public domain illustrations in my wallpapers, but this time I went for something a little different and used some photography instead! These snowflakes are photographs taken by a farmer/photographer named Winston Bentley around the turn of the (last) century. How cool! I’m a big fan of the public domain, since it allows people to access and creatively remix all sorts of interesting works. I think that having free access to these works is really important, and I’m glad that it exists.

Download

Desktop (2560 x 1440) • Tablet (2048 x 2048) • Mobile (744 x 1392)

(They’re sized for a 27″ iMac, a retina iPad, and an iPhone 5(/5S/5C) running iOS 7, respectively, but they should all work for smaller devices, too.)

But wait… there’s more! I’ll be posting a follow-up to my post on developing locally within the week. Stay tuned!

Monthly Wallpaper: November

wallpapers-november

I can’t believe that this is wallpaper 11 out of 12, or more importantly, that this is month 11 out of 12! To overuse a totally overused phrase… where has the time gone?! Time sure flies when you’re running your own business for the first time.

Onto November: I was considering making this month’s wallpaper completely grey and awful and maybe even using Comic Sans to reflect the wonderousness that is this cold, grey, windy, moustache-filled month. Living in Canada, we don’t even get Thanksgiving since we had ours in October! But then I decided to be an adult about it and try to look on the bright side. There’s beauty in almost anything if you look hard enough… right?

Download

Desktop (2560 x 1440) • Tablet (2048 x 2048) • 
Mobile (744 x 1392)

(They’re sized for a 27″ iMac, a retina iPad, and an iPhone 5 running iOS 7, respectively, but they should all work for smaller devices, too.)

(Also, I said I was going to continue making two mobile-sized wallpapers for iOS 7 devices and older versions of iOS because the sizes are different due to the introduction of parallax backgrounds, but then I said ‘nahhh, eff it’ because I’m assuming that 99% of the world has already upgraded by this point. And if you haven’t, tsk, tsk. Get to it. And if you’re not using an iPhone, then that’s just silly ignore everything I just said.)

Happy November!

Monthly Wallpaper: October (Edgar Allan Poe Edition)

wallpapers-october

This month’s wallpaper was both awesome and a headache to pull off.

It was great because I love October (and fall in general), and I’m (not-so) secretly a fan of all things dark, gothic and spooky. On the other hand, it was pretty annoying because of our dear friend iOS 7 and the introduction of parallax wallpapers. Much to my dismay, wallpapers that are the actual resolution of the phone (640 x 1136) are now distorted and artificially zoomed in on iOS 7, which means that all of my past wallpapers look like total garbage on my phone. Boohoo! So, all new wallpapers have to be made with a different resolution to fit properly. Thanks, Apple! Going forward I’ll be including two mobile sizes: one for iOS 7, and one for earlier versions of iOS. And, you know, other phones… but who uses other phones? Juuuuuuust kidding!

Download

Desktop (2560 x 1440) • Tablet (2048 x 2048) • 
Mobile — iOS7 (744 x 1392) • Mobile — old/other (640 x 1136)

(They’re sized for a 27″ iMac, a retina iPad, and an iPhone 5, respectively, but they should all work for smaller devices, too.)

Happy October, ladies and gents!

Monthly Wallpaper: September

Better late than never edition ;D

wallpapers-september

Download

Desktop (2560 x 1440) • Tablet (2048 x 2048) • Mobile (640 x 1136)

(They’re sized for a 27″ iMac, a retina iPad, and an iPhone 5, respectively, but they should all work for smaller devices, too.)

Happy almost fall!