Do you find that you send the same half-dozen emoji in all your communication? Maybe it’s 🤯 or you’re more upbeat and it’s 😻 or you’d just rather be 🌴🏄🏾♂️🌴 instead? No worries, your iPhone lock screen – and home screen – can showcase your faves with just a few taps…
From the very first programmer who realized that a colon, a dash, and a close paren could be interpreted as a smiley face if you tilted your head, graphical representations of emotions and objects has evolved quite a bit. There are now over 3,700 official Unicode emoji ranging from 🍎 to 🦓 and everything in between. They even have official meanings, according to Emojipedia.
If you’re like me, you also find that you gravitate to a small subset of those symbols, ones that best describe your frequent reaction to information and messages. For me, it’s 👍🏽 🙄 🤯 and ♥️ with maybe an occasional 🤠 and 🧐 added too. Fun stuff, no question, and a boon to interpersonal communication, but… what if you wanted to highlight them as your iPhone wallpaper? Turns out that feature’s already built into iOS! Here’s how to try it…
Shortcuts: Wallpaper Picker | Add Emoji | Save Your Creation
THE IPHONE WALLPAPER PICKER
You don’t even have to unlock your phone to change the lock screen wallpaper, as it happens! Simply tap on your screen to bring it to life, then tap and hold your finger in the very center of the display. After 3-4 seconds, it’ll shrink down and show you the wallpaper picker. Swipe right-to-left until you come to the very last entry, which will be headed “ADD NEW”:
Tap on the “+” in the middle of the screen and a whole lot of options and suggestions appear:
The suggested photos are pretty slick but really, all of the suggested wallpapers are quite attractive. If you spend a lot of time indoors, for example, the Weather wallpaper might help you keep track of daytime/nighttime. 😉
Notice the categories along the top, however: Photos, People, Photo Shuffle, Live Photo, Emoji, Weather, Astronomy, Color. (the last three aren’t shown in the above image). Pick “Emoji“.
The default emoji is the generic smiley face. Cheery, but if you’re not a smiley sort of person, no worries, you can delete it with the backspace button (the lower right shape with the ‘x’).
ADD YOUR FAVORITE EMOJI
At this point you can simply explore the thousands of emoji on the iPhone and add up to six of your favorites. As you add the emoji, they show up on the example screen at random locations and in a variety of sizes:
Ready to see all the different layouts now that you’ve picked your emoji? Of course you are! Tap on the “x” and you’ll be able to swipe between these five different design layouts for your shiny new wallpaper:
They are, left to right, Dynamic, Grid, Large, Radial, and Spiral. I really like Spiral, it’s very reminiscent of a basic tie-dye pattern. ☮️
Want a different background color than the default? Doable too. Tap on the tiny circle on the lower right and you can choose from a palette of colors, and even fine-tune it to make it lighter or darker:
A darker purple offers a very different visual than the bright yellow. Not 100% sure I prefer it, but it’s easy to change any time I want. In fact, I think I’ll change it back to the default by tapping on the top left color choice! 🧇
TIME TO SAVE YOUR WORK
All good? Tap on the “x” to remove the Background Color picker and then on “Done” on the top right.
You can now accept the default lock screen and desktop wallpaper pair – tap on “Set as Wallpaper Pair” – or tweak the home screek desktop image to work better with your app icons, as desired.
That’s a crazy and intriguing wallpaper, easily created based on my own favorite emoji. Note that this particular set of colors makes the widgets difficult to read, but.. whatevs. You now know how to fix the background color or design to help out in that regard (and you can change the clock’s color too). Have fun! 😆
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPhone and the Mac since they were first released. Please check out my extensive iPhone help area and Mac help area for oodles of useful content.