Wallpapers that make home-screen icon labels hard to read

Unlike the lock screen, the home screen always has icons on it. The wallpaper is never the star there. It’s the background laid under the icons. Even so, it sets the feel of the whole screen.

The problem on the home screen isn’t an unreadable clock but icon labels you can’t read. They’re small white text with a shadow, but not bold, and a bright background buries them easily.

So we measured how bright the lower part of each wallpaper is.

Measuring the bottom

Icons fill nearly the whole screen, but the bottom row and the dock are always in use. So for each wallpaper we cut out the bottom quarter and measured its brightness, with 0 as pure black and 255 as pure white.

The average was 90.9. The band where the lock-screen clock sits averaged 113.2, so the bottom is about 20 levels darker.

The bright group, where white icon labels are likely to be hard to read, came to 104 wallpapers, or 9.6% of the library. Compared with the 23.5% that caused trouble on the lock screen, conditions on the home screen are much better.

Why the bottom is darker

This is the flip side of the “brighter at the top” finding from our lock-screen measurements. The top of a photo tends to hold sky, while the bottom holds ground, water or shadow, so the bottom is naturally darker.

As a result, the same wallpaper usually gives more readable text on the home screen than on the lock screen. That’s why a photo you gave up on for the lock screen can work fine on the home screen. If the clock is hard to read over a photo you love, moving it to the home screen is an option.

What matters more than brightness

The home screen has another problem besides brightness, though: a busy background makes icons harder to find.

Icons come in every color and shape, which already makes them visually noisy. Put a fine pattern or a complex landscape underneath, and it takes longer to spot the one you want. Even with the right brightness, too much going on makes the screen harder to use.

So we measured the variation between light and dark across each whole image and counted the smooth ones. The smaller the variation, the plainer the background.

Wallpapers smooth enough overall (a standard deviation under 45) came to 137, or 12.7% of the library, which was fewer than we expected. Wallpapers based on photos inevitably carry a lot of detail.

What suits the home screen

Putting the measurements together, these are the wallpapers that suit the home screen:

• Dark at the bottom. White icon labels don’t sink in. 42% of the library fits
• Smooth. No fine patterns or complex scenery. Only 12.7% fit, so these are a minority
• Subject in the center. Icons line up in rows above and below, so the area near the center is less likely to be covered and the best part of the photo stays visible

Conversely, intricately detailed landscapes and patterns that fill the whole screen can be beautiful on their own yet awkward on the home screen. A wallpaper like that comes into its own if you keep icons off the first page.

Adjusting with your icon layout

You can also adjust things on the icon side, not just the wallpaper side.

Both iPhone and Android let you spread the home screen across several pages. Keep fewer icons on the first page and move them to the lower rows, and the top half of the wallpaper shows through untouched. Put your most-used apps in the dock and you lose almost nothing in practice.

On every wallpaper page on Drift Wallpapers, the home-screen preview shows the image with icons on top. It lays out 24 placeholder icons, which is a slightly tougher test than most real setups. If it looks fine there, it will almost certainly be fine on your phone.