First of all, get yourself a good background. These can be found on 4Chan (In the appropriate sections), and on Google Images. Find yourself something you like, and something that will blend with what you're looking to make your desktop look like. If you get a darker background, you'll probably be wanting darker themes and stuff later on in this How-To, so keep that all in mind. The key to having an awesome desktop is to make sure everything is coherent and isn't cluttered. Also, if you find an image that isn't as high-resolution as you need, try searching for a higher-resolution one on TinEye, or other reverse image-search-engines. Or, ask if anyone has a higher-resolution one on 4Chan, or some other forum.
Next, make any necessary changes to your background. I, for example, have a picture of a bunch of zombie arms reaching out from the left side of the screen. Since I have dual-monitors, it would look weird if I had arms sticking out of the left-side of both monitors, so I have two different wallpapers for each monitor. They are actually the same picture, but one is flipped horizontally so it looks better (You'll see in the final picture of my desktop). Apply your background to your desktop.
Next, organize your desktop icons. I use StarDock Fences to organize mine. It allows you to create Fences (sections) for your icons, and if you double-click on empty space, the icons on the desktop are hidden. Mine are all hidden, this is explained in the next section.
I also use the program StarDock ObjectDock for my dock. There are tons of different themes for it. You can get them at
DeviantArt. I have my desktop icons hidden so that I can just use "fly-out menus" on my dock to display my icons. They are separated into Games, and Applications (Although, I usually just use Steam to open up all my games). You can make your own icons for stuff (Make them have a 1:1 aspect ration, so, the sizes will be something like 128x128, 256x256, etc.) as well, or download them from Deviant Art.
Next up is Rainmeter. It's a big gadget sort of thing that has TONS of customization (In fact, the entire thing is customization). Get the themes for it from DeviantArt. You pick and choose only what you want out of each theme. I don't really make a lot of use out of this, but I like seeing my resources and what time it is, and being able to just press one button to safely shut down or restart my PC. The skins you download are very customizable, as you can edit each of their source codes.
You can get fonts for use with Rainmeter and ObjectDock (And anything else, for that matter) from websites like
DaFont.
The coding language for Rainmeter skins is pretty simple, so try making your own sometime.
This is my desktop. It's nothing special, but it works and looks decent, I guess. There's usually more stuff open on the 2nd monitor, but I closed them for the screenshot.
