WWDC24 Wallpaper

Apple’s annual developers conference, WWDC, is right around the corner! And to help dress up your desktop with some dub-dub decor, enjoy this wallpaper I rejigged from an Apple TikTok ad (TikTok | YouTube) promoting the event.

Process

For the past few days, Apple has been circulating a 10-second ad across social media promoting June 10 and the start of WWDC. The ad features a glowing Apple logo, then fancy transitions to text saying June 10 (aka, the beginning of the dub dub), flies through a few purple, orange, and yellow neon arches, and ends with text reading WWDC. In the time it took you to read that, you could have just watched it.

Anyway, I loved the look of that archway, and I thought it would make a gorgeous wallpaper to get us into the spirit of WWDC. Two problems: I needed more time to make the wallpaper from scratch than I had and wasn’t confident I could mimic the look of the wallpaper well enough for Monday.

So, I took the video, found a frame I liked, and began upscaling it to a respectable wallpaper size. The image below shows the starting point: a dull, pixellated, and full-of-artifacts 480p video still. I tried resizing it to a 6K, but that exaggerated a bunch of the artifacts from the original image, making it look dreadful at a higher resolution. That strategy wasn’t going to work.