I just received my Asus Transformer Prime Android Tablet with Ice Cream Sandwich. Being a person who loves to customize my gadgets around a uniform theme, I started to create some custom wallpapers for my new device.
I discovered quite quickly that switching between Landscape/Horizontal and Portrait/Vertical posed some interesting changes for creating custom wallpapers. This is especially true given the parallax scrolling ICS does with wallpapers.
After some research along with some trial and error, I created this Photoshop template. First off the “base” resolution to make everything work is documented at 1920 by 1408. However I found that when selecting a wallpaper from the Gallery, the cropping losses some of hight and it turns out less than 1920 by 1292 pixels are actually used. My template is 1920 by 1292, with a small marge at the top and bottom showing the cut off points.
In the template there is a group folder called “Guides”. This group and it’s subgroups contain opaque overlays to assist in image positioning. The opaque Red areas show the Landscape/Horizontal with two steps of diminishing fill to the right and left representing the additional desktops. The opaque Green shows the same for the Portrait/Vertical orientation. Black boxes in the corners and along the top and bottom edge indicate areas that are not shown in any orientation. There is also a sub Group called “Each Desktop” where the individual desktops in both the Landscape/Horizontal and Portrait/Vertical can be overlaid to test your image. Finally there is a black line on a layer named “Center Line”. This line will help in getting your wall paper centered.
In the template I’ve also included two of my own wallpaper creations, Bike Girl and Cafe Girl, to show how to use the opaque overlays. Cafe Girl is interesting because to shows how the change from Landscape/Horizontal to Portrait/Vertical can dramatically alter the composition of an image.
Enjoy!
