Create Your Own Logo Wallpaper

Your wallpaper, or screen background, is a very personal thing. It’s easy enough to place just about any image you want on your desktop with a click of the right mouse button, but you almost immediately get into problems with aspect ratios and resolution—an image that’s too small looks terrible when stretched across your monitor.

- Ian Evenden

So, why not make your own? There are lots of reasons why you should, from a cell phone shot being easily high enough resolution and likely the right aspect ratio, to the availability of the stunning photography Microsoft provides in its background packs (we like Reflections and Aurora Borealis). An image that is exactly the pixel dimensions of your monitor is always going to look sharper than one that’s had to be altered in some way, and that’s what a bespoke wallpaper offers.

If you do decide to make your own, why not brand your PC with some component logos? A lot of our PCs are bespoke designs themselves, after all. In anticipation of an AMD-powered monster emerging from Zak’s smoking lab, we did exactly that. 

1 Locate a Logo

First, catch your logo. We were lucky enough to score a Ryzen logo as a vector EPS file, which meant we could rasterize it in Photoshop to whatever size we wanted. So we made it 50 x 30cm at 300dpi—a preposterously large size for something that’s going to be displayed on a 1440p screen, or a 4K one at a push. The logo touched the edges of the canvas, so we used “Image > Canvas Size” to expand it to 70 x 50cm at 300dpi—over 8,200 pixels across. The logo is floating freely on its own layer, so we don’t need to extract it—you’ll want to do this if your logo is a .jpg or .png file, in order to fill in behind it. Cut around the logo with one of the marquee tools, or use one of the quick selection tools, then use “Layer > New > Layer Via Copy” to extract it.

2 Add Some Light