How To Customise Your Android Home Screen With A Minimalist Look

Customisation on Android is a multi-faceted activity. You can customise just about anything if you have the correct knowledge of the way Android works. However, one of the easiest (and most sought after) customisations is that of the Android home screen. It’s one element of the Android experience that begs for its own individuality and mood. Realising this fact, most users have gone out of their way to give their Android devices a new look by means of changing the home screen. Aided by a superb developer community, they have at their disposal a large arsenal of apps that simplify the process even further.

Today, we take a look at three Android apps that’ll help customise your home screen and give a very clean, refined and minimalist Android look. The first two will augment the last one in making the new look a complete one.

Project: Customise Android

The first thing we are going to do is replace your current launcher with an aftermarket launcher. There are many, many alternatives available to achieve this. Thereafter, we’ll select a HD wallpaper to play nice with the whole look we are aiming for. Finally, we’ll customise the icons of the launcher to give your that clean, minimalist look that’ll transform your Android.

Achieving the minimalist Android look

ADWLauncher

While there’s no dearth of launchers in the Android Market, very few actually do a brilliant job of satisfying user demands. ADWLauncher is one of them and comes for the amazing price of free. A very stable launcher backed up by an active support community, ADWLauncher will suit us well. Install it from the Android Market, and press the home button on your Android to get down to using the new launcher. Since the purpose of this post is more to customise the look of the home screen, we’re not going to dwell with the advanced settings of the launcher itself.

Wallpapers HD

Wallpapers HD provides us with a fairly large collection of high resolution images that can be downloaded for free and used as wallpapers. Install the app from the Android Market and select a wallpaper that you feel will go well with the whole clean look we’re aiming at.

Simple Text

Finally, the app that makes it all clean and sexy. SimpleText lets you create text-based, minimalist Android icons for any of your apps.In order to do so, you need to follow the following steps:

Drag whichever app you want to be “textified” on to your home screen (ADWLauncher).

Long press on the app icon and choose “Edit”. On the edit dialog, click on the icon to change it.

Select “ADWThemeIconPacks” from the consequent popup. If you have multiple themes installed, you’ll be taken to another popup from where you’ll need to select SimpleText.

In the SimpleText screen, select an existing template, or create a new one for your icon.

On the very next window, you can define the properties of the icon. Enter the text you want and select the respective properties. Once done, select Menu > “Save Icon” to save it. This will bring you back to the edit screen.

Press OK and stare at your new, minimalist Android icon. Repeat these steps for all other apps whose icon you want to change.

Personally, I like to keep my Android home screen as clean as possible. As an example, take a look at my homes creen above. Using the same methods described above, I’ve a total of only six “minimal” icons on my screen to give it a simple, minimalist Android look.

How do you customise your Android? Don’t forget to link to your Android customisations in comments below.