Lifehacker reader Aaron Gable put together this home screen as a tribute to one of his favourite artists, Piet Mondrian. Here’s how he put it together.
Aaron explains:
I’ve always been a fan of Piet Mondrian’s work, so when I got a RAZR M for the holidays, I decided to incorporate Mondrian’s aesthetic’s into my homescreen.
The UI you see is almost entirely the wallpaper. All of the coloured segments are transparent touch targets that launch my favourite apps. The middle screen is mostly communication (Phone, Google Voice, Chat, Contacts, and also Chrome, G+, and Camera); the left-hand screen is handy tools (Calendar, Bus schedule, my to-do app, etc.); and the right-hand screen is mostly media (Google Music, Play store, YouTube, etc.). The green bar on the righthand screen is my battery indicator.
The necessary tools include:
- Wallpaper: custom-made with Inkscape. You can grab Aaron’s here, sized for the Razr M series, or you can create your own in whatever image-editing program you prefer (heck, even MS Paint would probably work).
- Launcher: Nova Launcher, with the grid resized to fit over the wallpaper. He’s set the home button to open the app drawer when double tapped.
- Clock widget: One More Clock Widget, which opens up the Alarms app when tapped.
- Battery widget: UCCW, which he uses to get a battery indicator bar (on the far right) that changes from green to yellow to red as the battery gets low.
- App icons: Aaron used Nova Launcher to turn each icon into a transparent PNG overtop the wallpaper. For apps on top of tiles that took up more than one grid square, he used Minimalistic Text to create transparent widgets that launched the apps in question.
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