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How The Time Traveler makes these wallpapers with SI tools

Every wallpaper in this gallery starts as a written prompt and ends as a 16:9 file on your screen. Here's what happens in between.

It starts with Midjourney

The Time Traveler got a Midjourney account in September 2022 and has created with it ever since. Midjourney remains the mainstay for these wallpapers because it leaves a lot of room for high-quality images. The Time Traveler also experiments with Grok Imagine, which appears in the site's credits.

The wallpapers began almost by accident. The Time Traveler shared Midjourney images on X, people kept asking for them, and the images started coming out shaped to fit a screen.

Writing the prompt

A prompt is a written description of the image. The Time Traveler's prompts go back to #PromptSHARE, a daily series that started in 2023 with camera-and-lens portrait prompts. In October 2024 the series turned to phone wallpapers, with each prompt tucked into the image's alt text on X. That run became the most-liked stretch of the series, led by abstract designs.

The prompts that work best as wallpapers share three habits, which the Journal covers in detail:

• A tight palette of two or three named colors, so the image stays calm behind icons.
• Negative space, so the clock, icons and windows have somewhere quiet to sit. Words such as minimalist, smooth and dark background push the image that way.
• The right shape from the start. A desktop screen is wide, so The Time Traveler sets a 16:9 aspect ratio and generates desktop wallpapers in that frame instead of cropping later.

Picking the keepers

Midjourney returns a grid of four images for each prompt. The Time Traveler picks the ones that hold up as a background: strong at a glance, quiet where the icons go and free of obvious flaws.

Upscaling to 4K

Each keeper gets Midjourney's Creative upscale, which adds new detail. Midjourney's largest 16:9 output measures 2912x1632, so The Time Traveler then runs a second pass in Desqueeze Pro. That app resizes the image with Lanczos and Bicubic resampling, which enlarges it without inventing new detail, and takes the file to 3840x2160, the 4K size.

Naming and sorting

Each new keeper gets a real title, such as Dusk Beam Gradient or Vermilion Mist Ranges, plus a one-line tagline and a short description of what the image shows. The publishing check rejects raw file names. Each wallpaper then joins one or more of six categories: Abstract, Space, Architecture, Technology, Nature and Gradient.

Checking for repeats

Before any drop goes live, an automated check compares the new wallpapers with everything already published. It blocks files with identical bytes, images that look nearly the same under a different name and repeats of the same Midjourney job. A wallpaper that fails waits until a replacement passes. The check also confirms that each Download button delivers the bare wallpaper, never a mockup.

Mockups

The front page and each Telegram post lead with a mockup: the new wallpaper shown on a device screen, so you can judge how it looks in use. The mockup step fits the wallpaper into the screen area of a device photo and leaves the rest of the photo as it is. The cards and downloads in the gallery always show the wallpaper by itself.

The daily drop

New desktop wallpapers post to the Telegram channel at 10 a.m. Eastern time. Each post pairs a mockup photo with the full-size wallpaper file, and each uses the same title the gallery shows. The gallery updates in the same window, adding the new wallpapers to the top of the home page and the Gallery page. Nothing published earlier disappears from the Gallery.

Why it's called SI

The Time Traveler calls these tools SI, short for Super Intelligence. What keeps The Time Traveler going is bigger than pictures: a fascination with the potential Super Intelligence brings to the future of humanity. Each wallpaper is a small window onto that future.

Try it yourself

The Journal shares real prompts from #PromptSHARE, copied word for word, with notes on why each one works and how to adapt it for a 16:9 desktop. Start there if you want to make your own.

More guides: Set a wallpaper · 4K vs high resolution