How to Make Ambiance Wallpapers for Sailfish? + Bonus

I have seen that people are eagerly making wallpapers/ambiances for Jolla before it’s in their hands as you might have seen on jollawalls website already.

I think it’s time for a little tutorial because despite the fact that Jolla has a qHD resolution, the wallpapers needs to be longer than the usual size (540*1600 to be exact) in terms of height because of the vertical scrolling feature on Sailfish OS.

Since the wallpaper gradually moves with the rest of the screen (Icons, clock, etc.) but it’s a little bit slower, it might get a bit tricky making some wallpapers for Sailfish’s ambience feature.

Worry not because we have help from Jolla.

Before we start, let’s have a quick look at Jolla’s quick tutorial video about changing/customizing the ambiances:

 

Remember Jolla’s senior designer Jaakko Roppola whom had a very detailed interview with us about Sailfish design language and thinking behind the UI/UX just before the launch and you can hear his voice in this video? Well if you haven’t read the interview, I highly recommend you to read it because you will definitely learn something new from it each time you read it!

Anyway Jaakko has provided us some unique stuff to share with fans for the sake of making the phone look as good as it can get with different ambiances lightning up the colours inside the UI.  And as you would know this is just the beginning. If we get some good feedback on this, there will be more that comes from our channel to the worthy Jolla Users.

First you need to know that how you can adjust your photo.
There is a blank sample, [which also can be used for ambience, as a test image] which is provided below, and also uploaded on Dropbox for better quality.

In here if you are a Photoshop enthusiast, which I’m not (!) you can easily scale your image, crop it accordingly and make your own proper, simple yet colourful ambience wallpaper. (P.s: I have made it look smaller a little bit for the sake of it looks. The original size can be downloaded from Dropbox link)

Second you need to remember to do the couloring/shading according to the sample that as you can see it gradually gets darker as it comes down through the launcher.

 

By using that sample, you will make an image like this: (Full sized image in Dropbox)

 

Amazing, isn’t it?
So, dear Photoshoppers, do your magic with these stuff and submit your work to jollausers@gmail.com so we can publish them for you with your name and let the community use it for good on their Jolla phones!

 

And at the end; we have an exclusive nostalgic surprise for you all, let’s see if anyone can remember this… Or at least something extremely similar to it! Oh yes and please use it as your ambience if you own a Jolla. It looks minimalistic yet fantastic! (Full sized image uploaded to Dropbox)

 

If you want all of the files in one .zip formatted file, please click >> Here << to download the .zip file.

Hope the post was useful and hope to see some ambience wallpapers submitted to jollausers@gmail.com soon.

Cheers.