A designer’s quest to make a beautiful homescreen
The story with my android homescreen
A year ago, I bought a Nexus 4. I loved it. I spent several hours a day finding apps that would help me spend a several more hours a day on it. I really enjoyed customizing my phone to be unique and truly mine. I stuffed all my favorite apps for quick access and all the widgets that remind me of something when I glance at my homescreen. In no time my homescreen looked crowded. Folders helped me with apps but the widgets made it look terrible. Each widget had its own aesthetic appeal and it just felt like they all didn’t belong to the same place. It made me realize the beauty of the default setup. It had a simple digital clock widget with white bold font to emphasize the hour and thin transparent numbers for minutes. It exhibited elegance in simplicity. But I wanted to be reminded of a lot more things than just time when I unlock my phone — like tasks, unread mail, weather and many more. Luckily, I found someone who solved the problem — Roman Nurik, UI Designer at Google — and his solution was DashClock.
DashClock is a clock widget alternative for Android with a design inspired by Google’s own clock widget with subtle customizations on how the time looks. That’s the ‘clock’ part of it. In the rest lies a revolutionary idea. DashClock has an extension system with an Open API which makes it a dashboard for all the tiny useful information you want to look at frequently or that you want to be reminded of. The information is subtly represented using a transparent white icon and and bold white text which matches perfectly with other parts of the homescreen. A battery extension for its percentage, a Any.Do extension for today’s tasks, one for unread mail and missed calls and a few more extensions showed me everything I wanted in a real-estate less than one tenth of which individual widgets would have required. I had everything I need in a single cohesive and beautiful experience. It worked fantastically well for me. Time and again, I found a good new app that finds its way to my homescreen. I frequently changed my setup so that I could get to my most frequently used apps as fast as possible. I even changed the entire launcher when I found a good one, but DashClock stayed at the top center of my screen all through. I was done with my homescreen for a while, then came KitKat.
The wallpaper quest
Google just made the noti. They caught my attention. Wallpapers! I started searching. Searching for images that please my eye with their bright colors and make me want to take a screenshot of my phone a thousand times. Of all the websites and wallpaper services I tried, Google plus’s Android Wallpapers community worked the best for me. Within 5 minutes of surfing through the community’s feed, I found more than 20 astonishing wallpapers and easily downloaded them. But then, the problem surfaced. My widgets weren’t legible on any of those wallpapers with bright sharp landscapes with saturated colors. Though I haven’t spent much time on searching them, I gave up my wallpaper quest when everything I downloaded were destined to trash. So, a year later, I was back with a problem in my homescreen. But, I was lucky again to have found someone who solved it. And he’s Roman Nurik again.
музей, pronounced ‘muzei’, which means ‘museum’ in Russian
“A live museum on your Android homescreen” reads his description for the app in Google Play. It truly does put a museum in the palm of your hand. The app picks one of the famous artworks like ‘The Starry Night’ by Vincent Van Gogh or ‘Mona Lisa’ by you know who, and sets it as the wallpaper for that day. Or you can make it your personal museum by telling it randomly pick from your camera roll. Well, how does this solve my problem of legibility of my widgets. There were two reasons for my widgets not being legible — 1. The bright colors of a wallpaper didn’t provide enough contrast for the white widgets and 2. The sharp images of landscapes produced sudden change in contrast which made the information less readable. Roman solved this by using two basic image processing techniques — 1. Dim and 2. Blur. Dimming the wallpaper provided good contrast and the blur reduce sudden changes in it. Brilliance in simplicity. The end result is your apps and widgets glowing on a glass pane with a great painting under it. It doesn't end there. He applied the same philosophy of his previous app which made it stand out to this as well. Muzei is extensible and open. This opens up your phone to the whole world of art waiting to amaze you. For example a Flickr extension for muzei can just shuffle through the photos of your favorite photographer, or the photos taken at particular place, or the photos with ‘#landscape’ in their description. This is just one extension for one service. The possibilities are merely endless. But anything related to beauty can never be solved completely. We humans naturally crave for more no matter how much you already have. I still want my phone to look better than what it does right now. I still search for better looking images, and some of the problems that existed before with the selection of wallpapers, persist even with muzei.
The Human eye appreciates an image based on various aspects. Sometimes it’s the eye popping colors and sometimes it’s the uniqueness of the shot, but many a time it’s the ‘detail’. As muzei uses blur to give the spotlight to widgets and apps, the detail of the wallpaper I just thought was amazing is lost. So my problem of finding wallpapers ‘compatible’ with DashClock has just converted to be ‘compatible’ with muzei. But the effort on my part to find good backgrounds for my homescreen is greatly reduced by the extensions for muzei. I could easily skim through the wallpapers that haven’t pleased me and stop at the striking ones. And sometimes I have had sweet surprises when I set the wallpaper to change every six hours. It is really an awesome feeling to just pick up your phone and find it so gorgeous. And it is precisely that feeling which made me take a screenshot of my phone a ten thousand times.
A good design makes for such cherishable experiences and Roman has already given a lot of them to me. He continues to inspire me with his attention to detail in the design of his apps. Be it the cool loading animation or the way app opens as if it was always ready waiting for me to open it, the experience his design provides is extremely pleasing. He is exceptional with his design strategies. The way he solves a problem in an open software platform by building another open software platform speaks about his ability to think out of the box. For the designer in me, he has provided loads of inspiration with his work. And for every Android user out there, he made their homescreen — a gateway for art — a museum.
Roman Nurik has himself written a story on muzei, check it out — Serendipitous ideas
Play Store links for other widgets in the screenshots:
Toggles widget — Power Toggles, Analog Clock — 12 Hours and Countdown widget
