The basic premise of a functional wallpaper is that should be fairly low contrast, minimally saturated and overall should not steal the focus from the actual items on the deskop.
Personally I like more neutral, simple wallpapers. Abstract macro photography, GIMP’s noise filter are always a good start. However, I always wanted to go overboard and do one of those overcrowded techoid wallpapers sites like GFX Artist are full of.
(click on the thumbnail for 1920x1200px res)
The core of the wallpaper has been rendered in Blender, many elements created in Inkscape. Final composition done in GIMP. The lorem ipsum text has been laid out in Inkscape though. GIMP’s text tool has to catch up in the flowed text department.
Great wallpaper! Don’t suppose you would have the opportunity to post the image before you added the GIMP post processing? Just to see which bits were done in which program out of curiosity.
DRF: I didn’t just touch up a blender render. It was a series of renders and assembly in GIMP. I only took a handful of screenshots in the process if that’s any useful to you.