If you just picked up this phone, and you want to know how to personalize its aesthetics, fear not. Here’s how to customize the theme on your Motorola Edge+.
Decide whether you want to use the light theme or dark theme
A good place to start is deciding whether you want a lighter or darker aesthetic for your phone. Hold your finger down on the home screen and tap on the Personalize option. Navigate over to the System Theme section, and you’ll see the option to choose the light theme or dark theme.
These two are pretty axiomatic. The light theme will give all of the menus, accents, and buttons a lighter color. They will lean more toward white. The dark theme will give everything a darker appearance. There is a third option that you can choose called Transition. This will change your theme based on the time of the day. At sunset, it will change your theme to the dark theme, and it will change it to the light theme at sunrise.
Now, let’s change that wallpaper
The most basic visual customization is the wallpaper. Changing the wallpaper is really straightforward, and there are different ways you can access the menu. The easiest way is by holding your finger down on any spot on your home screen. The menu that pops up will have options like Personalization and Widgets. You’ll also see an option for Wallpapers. Tapping on that option will present you with several wallpaper categories to choose from. The top option will let you use the photos that are on your device as a wallpaper. The second category has interactive wallpapers. Those move and play animations whenever you swipe on the screen. The next category is called Styles. With this one, you’ll choose a picture from your Google Photo library. After picking it, you’ll have five different options of filters to put over the photo. Lastly, the final category has a selection of wallpapers provided by Google. All you have to do is tap on a wallpaper, position the photo the way you want to and decide if you want to apply the wallpaper to the home screen, the lock screen, or both.
Next, you can change up your app icons
You chose the wallpaper you want, but what about the app icons that float over it? With the Motorola Edge+, you can finetune how your app icons look in your custom theme. There are two main options that affect your app icons in the Personalization menu. The first option is the Layout option. With this, you can adjust the grid that your apps sit in on the home screen. By default, you start off with a grid of 4×5 (this means that four apps will go across the screen and five will go up and down). There are also 5×6, 5×5, 4×6, 4×4, and 3×4.
After you find the right grid, you can choose what shape you want them to be. Go over to the Icon Shape section in the Personalize menu and choose from five shapes. There’s a circle, a square, a rounded square, a teardrop shape, and an amorphous blob.
Change up your display size and font
If you have a hard time seeing the screen, changing the display size will be a gift. Go to the Personalize menu and find the Display Size section. There, you’ll see four options. Changing the display will change the size of EVERYTHING in the software. The size of the text will change along with app icons, widgets, and UI elements in apps.
While adjusting the display size affects the text’s size, there’s a separate section dedicated to text size. This helps if you only want to adjust the text’s size but leave everything else the same. Going to the Font Size section will give you four size options for the text. Next, you can change the font of the text. When you go to the Fonts section, you’ll see five different fonts that will be applied to all of the text in your system.
Last but not least, you can change up the colors
If you like being able to change the aforementioned settings, you’ll love the ability to change the colors that are present in your theme. Dynamic Color, the ability to create a custom system color palette based on the colors in your wallpaper, was introduced with Android 12. The Pixel phones can do this, but the Motorola Edge+ gives you more control over the color palette in your theme.
To use Dynamic Color, go to the Colors section in the Personalize menu. When you do, you’ll see a preview of your wallpaper with some of the UI elements with the applied color palette. Under that, you’ll see a scrolling list of different colors you can apply to the theme. You’ll eventually scroll to a selection of colors pulled from the wallpaper (you’ll know when the text over the colors reads “Wallpaper colors”). Tapping on an option will change the colors automatically.
What if you don’t want the system to do the work?
If you don’t want to use colors pulled from your wallpaper, then you can choose your own colors. Right when you scroll past the selection of wallpaper colors, you’ll see a color picker option. Tapping on it will show you a slider with the full-color spectrum. Use the slider to select the specific hue you want to assign to your UI. You, unfortunately, have some limitations in this regard. You can only adjust the hue of the color, but you can’t change the brightness or saturation. Still, being able to pick what color you want for the UI is still impressive. What’s neat is that you can also save that specific hue and use it with another theme. Buy the Motorola Edge+
