Solid color wallpapers

A plain wallpaper is the most practical one there is. It keeps app icons, widgets and desktop files easy to read, it never clashes with a theme, and on a phone with an OLED screen a true black background turns those pixels off completely, which saves a little battery and makes the clock look like it floats. The old site's solid black and plain blue and green images were some of its most linked files, mostly by people looking for exactly this.

The preset below starts at pure black, #000000, with two almost identical near-blacks, so the result looks flat but still has a very slight depth. For a truly solid color, set all the swatches to the same value. For a single color with a hint of shading, keep the first swatch as your color and make the others a touch darker or lighter. A navy, a forest green or a warm grey are all calmer than bright primary colors for a screen you look at all day.

Size matters even for a plain image. Download at your screen's native resolution, such as 1206 × 2622 for a recent iPhone or 1080 × 2400 for many Android phones, so the system doesn't scale it and add banding. The phone lock screen and home screen sizes guide on our blog lists the common ones.

If a plain screen feels too empty, switch the style to minimal lines or gradient and keep the colors close together. You get a little texture without losing the calm.