Desktop wallpapers: sizes, styles and making your own

A good desktop wallpaper is made at your screen's exact resolution, keeps a calm area where your icons and windows sit, and is quiet enough to look at all day. Most monitors are 16:9, at 1920×1080, 2560×1440 or 3840×2160 pixels, while many laptops are 16:10 or close to it; check yours in your display settings and design at that size or larger. Soft gradients, single colours with grain and wide, low contrast photographs age best. Busy images look exciting for a day and tiring for a month.

Desktop wallpaper sizes

Your wallpaper should match your screen's native resolution. On Windows it is under Settings, System, Display; on a Mac, System Settings, General, About lists the built in display's resolution. Laptops with high density screens often show a scaled size there, so look for the native or default resolution if both are listed.

Phones are a different shape entirely, with a clock and widgets to work around; phone wallpaper size covers them.

Desktop wallpaper styles that last

A wallpaper is a background in the most literal sense: windows, icons and the dock or taskbar all sit on top of it. The styles that work best are the ones that stay out of the way.

• Soft gradient. Two or three related colours blending slowly. Calm, modern and easy on the eyes. More in gradient wallpaper.
• Dark with one light source. A near black ground with a single glow of colour in one corner. Good for evenings and dark mode.
• Single colour with grain. A flat colour with fine noise looks like paper or film rather than a default.
• Wide, low contrast landscape. Fog, sea, desert or sky. Avoid detailed foregrounds that clash with icons.
• Minimal shape. One circle, arc or line on a plain field. Ideal if you keep a tidy desktop.
• Typographic. One word or line, set small and off centre. Works when it is quiet, not shouted.

Where to leave room for desktop icons and windows

Windows places desktop icons down the left by default, and macOS stacks desktop items down the right. The taskbar or dock runs along the bottom. Put the most interesting part of your wallpaper away from those areas, usually upper centre or the opposite side, and keep the icon side calm so labels stay readable.

With two monitors, you can either set one wallpaper per screen or span a single wide image across both. Spanning only works when the screens share a resolution and sit level; otherwise make two wallpapers in the same palette, with the light source on the inner edge of each, so they read as a pair. If you switch between light and dark mode, a matching light and dark version of the same design keeps the desktop feeling like one place.

How to make your own desktop wallpaper

1. 1

   Find your resolution

   Check your display settings and note the native size. Use 3840×2160 if you switch between screens.

2. 2

   Choose a mood, not an image

   Calm or energetic, dark or light. Choose colours from a place, a season or your brand.

3. 3

   Build the background

   Start with a ground colour, add one or two related colours, and place the brightest area away from your icons.

4. 4

   Add grain

   A fine noise layer stops smooth gradients from showing steps on large screens. See gradient banding.

5. 5

   Export as PNG and set it

   PNG keeps gradients smooth. Set it to fill the screen rather than stretch or tile.

Gradiently's Studio has wallpaper templates and lets you set any custom size from 200 to 8,000 pixels, so you can match your screen exactly. Pro exports go up to 4K without a watermark, and a Mark you have claimed is a living gradient only you can export with. Make the desktop version, then a phone version in the same look, and your devices match.

Common desktop wallpaper mistakes

For a wallpaper that moves, see live wallpaper; for video calls, a Zoom virtual background uses the same 1920×1080 frame with different rules. And if you build websites, the same 16:9 thinking applies to a website hero background at 1920×1080.