Cosmetically tweaking the laptop

Did you notice how laptops and net­books are quickly becom­ing fash­ion accessor­ies? Rather than tot­ing around the dull black or obsidian tab­let, folk are car­ry­ing around cus­tom­ized art­work, pimped and detailed to the point that the lowly laptop rivals any­thing Chip Foose would do to a clas­sic Chevy.

Heck, someone even laser-etched all the levels from the Game Boy Super Mario game onto his eeePC net­book.

So, not want­ing to be left out, I looked for an easy way to have art on my own laptop.

Gelaskin to the res­cue. To quote the website:

GelaSkins are remov­able cov­ers for pro­tect­ing and cus­tom­iz­ing your port­able devices. They fea­ture stun­ning, photo-quality graph­ics ran­ging from fine art prints to con­tem­por­ary urban images designed by our grow­ing fam­ily of artists from around the globe.

So I picked up a couple, one for my 17″ Viao and another for my wife’s 13″ Dell laptop.

Since Gelaskins come in pre-cut sizes, I had to trim the skins to fit the laptop faces. Care­ful cut­ting with a hobby knife pro­duced pretty good res­ults. The Gelaskin mater­ial cut quite eas­ily, and the sharp knife let me make roun­ded corners without shred­ding or tear­ing the material.

Applic­a­tion was fairly easy. Just peel the back­ing paper off, care­fully align the skin with the laptop back, and apply lightly. The mater­ial sticks quite quickly, so be sure of your pos­i­tion before you smooth it out and remove any air bubbles.

And, as the skin is some­what flex­ible, it will con­form to any embossed or detailed logo under­neath. I covered the logos with the skin, but I could have eas­ily trimmed the logo out of the skin after applic­a­tion to let the logo appear through the art.

Ok, the back­side is done, but what about the desktop? Again, Gelaskin to the res­cue. Desktop wall­pa­per is avail­able for many of the Gelaskin designs, so you can have a match­ing or com­ple­ment­ary desktop to go with your funky new fash­ion­able cover.

Though in this case, I did a quick search on Kat­sushika Hok­u­sai, the artist who craf­ted the mas­ter­ful wood­cut The Great Wave. It’s the skin that I selec­ted for my laptop. In this case, there are high res­ol­u­tion ver­sion avail­able online, which are eas­ily adap­ted for desktop use.

Gelaskins are avail­able for most net­book and laptop designs, as well as cel phones and port­able media devices.