I Draw Desktops
I'm Shaun. I'm an illustrator.
I was starting to not enjoy drawing anymore.
I was a game concept artist for years. Monsters, weapons, armor, costumes, props, dark forests, battle scenes. You name it, I drew it. Every week a new brief, every brief the same rhythm. Draw, deliver, next. Draw, deliver, next. The portfolio looked impressive. But the work itself felt like a factory line. At some point I stopped seeing what I was drawing. It was just output.
One day I realized something that scared me: I was starting to not enjoy drawing anymore. The thing I'd loved since I was a kid was becoming mechanical. And I thought, everyone's screen is already full of pressure. If I can draw, why not draw something that gives people a moment to breathe?
I went independent. Took freelance illustration work, drew what I wanted on the side. It was better. But the question stayed with me: what would it look like to really make something of my own?
Then I drew a different desktop.
One evening in early 2025, after ten hours on my Mac, somewhere around the third revision of a client project that still wasn't right, I closed all my windows and looked at my desktop. Default wallpaper. Rows of blue folders. I'd been staring at this surface all day, and it had the emotional warmth of a parking lot.
I opened Photoshop on the same Mac I'd been grinding on all day, pulled my drawing tablet closer, and started drawing a different desktop. A little farm. A wooden cottage with a lantern by the door. A garden full of fruits and vegetables. A river running along the bottom with ducks swimming in it, a frog sitting on a lily pad, and a tiny rowing boat drifting by. And every folder icon was something in the scene. A sunflower. A pumpkin. A bunch of grapes. A bear peeking out of the soil. A watering can leaning against a bench.
That night was just a rough sketch. Over the next two weeks I kept refining the details. The wood grain on the dock. The way light hits a cabbage leaf. The little fish half-hidden under the water. When I finally applied the full set to my actual Mac, I sat there staring at it. It looked real. Not like a wallpaper with icons on top. Like a whole world living on my screen.
I was arranging a tiny farm on my desktop, and I couldn't stop smiling.
That feeling made me want to draw the next one immediately. A climbing wall. A beach house. A candy glass wonderland. A penguin island. A puppy playground. A spaceship. Theme after theme, each one took two to three weeks. Each one was a complete scene. The wallpaper and the icons were one illustration, designed to feel like one world.
And here's the part I didn't expect: people started arranging them. Because every folder icon is a drawn object, you can drag it anywhere on the desktop. Someone moved all the flowers to the garden and all the vegetables to the field. Someone else lined the ducks up along the river. Everyone was building their own version of the farm, the beach, the meadow. Every theme is a world. Every person makes it theirs.
Over the next year, I kept drawing new themes and selling them as digital downloads on e-commerce platforms.
People started cleaning their desktops.
People bought them. The messages surprised me. Not just "this is pretty," but real things. A med student in Seoul said the felt theme was "the one gentle thing on her screen during boards." A freelance writer in São Paulo said he changed his desktop for the first time in five years and felt like he'd rearranged his apartment.
One kind of feedback came up again and again that I never expected. People said that before applying the theme, their desktop had been a mess for months. Screenshots everywhere, random downloads they never cleaned up, folders they forgot about. But once the theme was on, they naturally started tidying up. Sorting files, deleting what they didn't need, making space for the illustration to breathe.
One person described it as redecorating their home. After that, every time they opened their Mac, it felt good. Not just clean. Warm.
But then the other messages came. The ones that all said the same thing, in different words: "I love this but I spent twenty minutes setting it up and I'm not sure I'd do it again." "The icons reset after an update. I don't have the energy to redo them." "Can you just make this easier?"
I couldn't. I'm an illustrator. I know Photoshop, not Xcode.
"Can you just make this easier?"
The frustrating part was the math. Each theme has at least ten folder icons. Some have over forty. When you buy a digital download, the only way to apply them is manual. Right-click a folder, Get Info, drag the icon image in, close the window. Then the next folder. And the next. It takes about fifteen minutes to replace and arrange everything. I was selling a moment of calm wrapped in fifteen minutes of friction.
Why not solve this the Apple way?
Around that time, I saw Apple posting content on their social channels and hosting events that featured artists doing desktop customization. They were actively encouraging this kind of creative work. That felt like a huge signal to me. If Apple sees value in what artists like us are doing, maybe this is something worth taking seriously.
But it also made me notice something. Even in those features, the way people actually applied custom folder icons was still the same old painful process. The art was being celebrated. The experience of using it was still broken.
I called YG. She's my partner, the one who thinks about product, business, the things I'm not good at. I told her what I'd seen, and about all the customer messages asking for an easier way. We talked it through and the answer became obvious: we should build a Mac app. One that lets people switch an entire theme in one tap. No more manual setup.
One tap, and the whole desktop changed.
YG spent three months building the first version. Learning Xcode, SwiftUI, figuring out how to make folder icon replacement actually work on macOS. I kept drawing while she built.
Then she showed me the first demo. All my themes were there. I tapped one, and the entire desktop changed. Wallpaper, folder icons, everything, in one second.
This is what it actually feels like to step into one of my worlds. Not fifteen minutes of Get Info and paste. One tap, and you're there.
After that, we spent another two months collecting user feedback and refining every detail of the experience. Previewing, applying, fine-tuning individual icons to your taste, adapting themes to different folder sizes, restoring one folder or your entire desktop back to default. We polished every step until the whole experience felt as effortless as the themes look.
During that time, I kept drawing new themes at my usual pace, one every two to three weeks, carefully crafting each one. Adding playful visual details and little surprises. I want every theme to find the person who loves it.
Not productive. Not optimized. Just cozy.
When we needed a name, YG asked me: what do you want people to feel when they use this?
I didn't have to think long. Cozy. Not productive. Not optimized. Just cozy. That feeling of being settled in your own small corner of the world. A warm desk, a good light, your things around you. That's what I draw. That's what I want every desktop to feel like.
Not escaping your life. Enjoying the one you're in, right now, right here.
I'm still drawing.
Cozy v1.1.0 is now on the Mac App Store. We made it compatible from macOS 14 all the way to the latest macOS 26, because we wanted as many Mac users as possible to experience it.
And I'm still drawing, still updating, one new theme every two to three weeks. Each one starts on my MacBook. Same screen I work on, same desk, same drawing tablet I've used since art school. Late at night, usually after a long day, usually with my cat curled up on the corner of the desk refusing to move.
Each theme ends up on someone else's Mac. A student in exam season. A designer in a sprint. Someone working late who minimizes all their windows and, for a second, sees a rooftop garden instead of a void.
I can't make their deadlines go away. But I can make the cracks between their windows feel like somewhere instead of nowhere.
