There are lots of great launchers available for Android, Nova launcher is the best. The launcher app brings lots of customization choices but if there’s one thing it wants, it’s a theme store. Some people will say that there’s no need of a theme store in Nova launcher because you can easily create Nova Launcher themes.

Steps to create a Nova launcher theme:

To install the Nova launcher from the Google Play Store. You can try the free version to get started but most of the cool options are available in Nova Launcher Prime ($4.99).  Additionally, ensure to make Nova your default launcher. To do it, go to Settings->Home or Settings->Apps and press the settings part and then check “Default Apps”.

1. Set a beautiful Wallpaper of your choice

Your home screen wallpaper is the base of your Nova launcher theme, as you will have to select the other elements based on your wallpaper. It’s important to choose a wallpaper that looks beautiful and can stand the test of time. For our theme, we used a flat-looking simple wallpaper called “Matexial 28” from the Wallrox wallpaper app.

You can select highly detailed and customizable wallpapers from the likes of KLWP, Muzei, although these apps can get highly complicated at times. You can also select between the various wallpapers in apps like Zedge, Backgrounds HD

2. Install an Icon Pack that Compliments the Wallpaper

There is amazing icon packs available for Android but we will have to select an icon pack with the wallpaper. It’s important that the icons don’t look out of place against the wallpaper. We chose the Voxel icon pack for our theme, considering it brings a flat design and our wallpaper is on the same lines. In addition, we like the unified square icons that Voxel brings. To change icons in Nova, go to Nova Settings->Look & feel->Icon theme and select the icon pack you want.

You can choose your very own icons and we’d advise you the likes of Merus, Aurora, Elun, Nimbbi, Polycon etc.

3. Add good-looking and functional widgets

Widgets not just bring functionality and information to your home screen but they also bring a touch of beauty. So, you can add some excellent widgets to enhance you Nova launcher theme. In fact, in our theme, we used quite a few widgets. We used the very popular Zooper Widget Pro app to add one of its standard template widgets called “DaveDate“.

We also created a custom widget of our own through Zooper to display system info like battery and storage. We used a scalable icon set to show the battery icon, rich text for the battery details and simple text to show storage details. Zooper offers a ton of options, similar to KLWP, so you can customize a widget.

Along with the couple of Zooper widgets, we added a music player widget with Shuttle, which brings a couple of widget layouts along with options to edit transparency, colors, background and text. With the music player widget, we also used one of the 1Weather weather widgets. In the 1Weather widget, we chose the Background to be transparent, Icon Set & Accent to be Black and the Clock ace “Custom”. Finally, we also added a Google Keep widget to our theme.

Note: We used Black text on all our widgets to give the widgets a good contrast against the light wallpaper and colorful icons from Voxel.

4. Fiddle with Nova Launcher options

Nova launcher theme already be looking beautiful but you want to add some finishing touches with some Nova launcher settings.

Desktop

Nova launcher lets you customize the desktop also known as home screen of Android to the hilt. In Nova Settings->Desktop, you can change the icon grid, icon layout, width & height padding, search bar styles, page indicators & color, wallpaper scrolling and more. You can also check out the various scroll effects (card stack, tablet, glass, wipe etc.) that make an enormous difference in the user experience. There are also options to overlap widgets, lock desktop and much more.

For our theme, we played with only a few options. We set the desktop grid size to “5×5”, icon size to “110%” and font to “medium” in Icon layout, width & height padding to “None”, turned off wallpaper scrolling and chose the “Wipe” scroll effect.

• App & widget drawers

We can also change the app and widget drawers to suit your needs. Nova brings choices to change the grid in the app drawer, drawer style for apps and widgets, transition animation, scroll effects and much more. You can also select to see the app drawer in tab style, similar to the previous versions of the Android, group drawers and add a search bar. In case you don’t like the white background of the drawer, you can select to have another image or simply keep it transparent.

Our theme was more expected at home screen enhancements, so we did not make any changes to app & widget drawer settings.

Dock

Dock includes the icons that are available at the bottom in every home screen page. Nova gives you chance to add pages to the dock and increase the number of icons in the dock. You can additionally change the icon size, font, padding and enable “dock as overlay”, which lets you toggle the dock with gestures. There’s an option to change the dock background as well.

We changed the icon size in the Dock to 110% for our theme, to match the icon size to our home screen icons.

• Folders

You can easily go to Nova Settings->Folders and change how the folder and the icons inside look. You can select to have icons in stack, grid, fan or line, while maintaining folder background to the N Preview style or circle, square, disc etc. There are also options to change transition of folders, background and the icon layout.

We altered the folder preview to “Stack” and folder background to “Disc”, to match the black contrast we used in the widgets.

• Look & feel

Nova Settings->Look & feel is the place the major action lies. Here, you can select the icon theme, scroll & animation speed (relaxed, stock, nova, fast, faster than light), app animations and even force a screen orientation, if that’s thing that you need. If you don’t like seeing the notification bar all the time, you can even turn it off. You can enable “Dark icons”, which will make the status/notification bar icons black.

To give our theme that added zing, we changed the animation speed to “Relaxed”, to get a sidebar like animation while swiping to another home screen, on account of the “Wipe” scroll effect. We also enabled “Dark icons” to match our themes’ widgets and icon labels.

• Night mode

If you like dark themes, you should change the Night mode schedule to “Always” in Nova Settings->Night mode. When the Night mode is turned on, you can enable the dark theme for Search bar, Drawer, Drawer icon and Folders.

• Gestures and Unread count badges

Gestures are what make Nova launcher wonderful. The launcher gives you a chance to choose actions for various swipe gestures (swipe up, swipe down, pinch in, pinch out, double tap, two finger swipes etc.), so that you can launch apps, make a call, search, use Google Now and lots of other actions. You can select the actions you need because when it comes to gestures, to each his/her own.

New check identifications are not part of Android’s interface but if you booed when they were removed, Nova lets you enable unread count badges and even customize them. In case you are ignorant, unread count badges are used to let you know the number of unread notifications for mails, SMS etc. on the icons itself. To enable you will have to install the TeslaUnread for Nova Launcher, which keeps track of the unread count on apps. Once enabled, you can customize the position, size, style and color of these badges.

Note:

It’s important to note here that some features and options are limited to Nova Launcher Prime, which is a paid app ($4.99). The Prime version packs in exclusive scroll effects , gesture support, ability to hide apps, icon swipes etc.

We only made changes in the desktop, dock, folders and look & feel settings of Nova for our theme.