Purple, Gold and a Little Desktop Personality

I've written before about switching to Omarchy and building a plugin to control my Govee lights. This time, the project was a little less functional and a little more personal: a Minnesota Vikings-inspired desktop theme.

Purple and gold is a fairly distinctive starting point. The challenge was making those colours work on a machine I use for development, rather than just producing a striking wallpaper. I wanted the desktop to have some character, while still leaving the code and terminal output easy to read.

The result is available on GitHub: Minnesota Vikings for Omarchy. It includes the theme configuration and all three wallpapers shown here.

Making the colours work

The base is a deep, almost black purple. Gold provides the accent, with ivory text and lavender terminal colours to keep things readable. The stronger Vikings purple comes through in selections and other details, rather than covering every surface.

That balance matters. A desktop theme spends most of its life behind the work you're doing. It needs to look good with windows open, not just when you've cleared everything away for a screenshot.

Here's the theme with applications running:

The theme uses Omarchy's colors.toml format. Omarchy generates the application configurations from its own templates, so the palette is the starting point for a consistent desktop. The repository records the version it was created and tested with: Omarchy 4.0.4.

Three wallpapers, three different moods

The wallpapers were created with OpenAI's image generation tool. We kept the same purple, gold and ivory palette across them, but explored three different ways of expressing the idea.

Skol

The helmet artwork at the top of this post is the most direct connection to the Vikings: a purple football helmet with sweeping ivory and gold horns. The subject sits to the right, leaving a darker, quieter area on the left for windows.

View or download the original Skol wallpaper.

Northern Gold

This one takes the Nordic direction: snowy mountains, a still lake, purple aurora and a thin sweep of gold across the sky. There's a small longship near the shore, but the landscape does most of the work.

It's the quieter alternative if you like the colours but don't want a football helmet on your desktop.

View or download the original Northern Gold wallpaper.

Purple and Gold Stadium

The third background brings it back to football: an empty stadium at night, purple cloud and mist, gold lighting, and a field marking leading towards the goalposts.

View or download the original stadium wallpaper.

All three original wallpapers are 1672 × 941 pixels. The generation prompts are included in ARTWORK.md if you're interested in how they were made or want to experiment with a different direction.

Try it on your desktop

On Omarchy, install the theme with:

1omarchy theme install https://github.com/mlambert-uk/omarchy-minnesota-vikings-theme

Then select it from the theme picker, or run:

1omarchy theme set minnesota-vikings

To choose between the included wallpapers:

1omarchy theme bg-switcher

You can also cycle to the next background with omarchy theme bg next. The repository README has the installation details, palette and licence information.

This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Minnesota Vikings or the NFL.

One of the things I enjoy about this kind of small project is that it doesn't need a grand justification. Sometimes it's enough to make a tool you use every day feel a little more like yours.

Skol!