Google was launching their new, premium-hardware smartphone, The Pixel, and asked us to design wallpapers to complement the experience. Wallpapers are typically the least innovative part of any smartphone package, but, to us, the real estate of a smartphone’s wallpapers represented an opportunity to bring Google’s core design principles - simplicity, customization, and innovation - to the widest possible audience. We set out to design a series of wallpapers that combined Google’s technological prowess with the beautiful hardware design of the Pixel.

We created a series of wallpapers that establish the Pixel as an iconic Google brand. Each wallpaper was designed to be as (subtly) contextually relevant to the user as possible, from geography to current battery life. And since Google’s geo-imagery has long been a differentiating and powerful staple of the brand, that’s where we began our three designs which came to be featured on every Pixel phone.

Live wallpapers are dynamic and use real-time data to relate to the user. Your World, offers a globe-level view of your current location. Inspired by Apollo 17’s Blue Marble, this live wallpaper views Earth from space based on your GPS location with real-time clouds updated from Google Earth. We wrote a custom shader to work on the GPU, using GLSL to avoid excessive battery consumption.

Diorama creates live scenic shifts. Via scale and motion, we created six dioramas using Google Earth imagery. Each features locations that animate dynamically on the phone unlock and swiping through your homescreen, created using 3D models and textures, rendering them in OpenGL.

Horizon dramatizes battery life on your phone with sun movement. The sun rises as your phone charges and lowers as the battery is consumed - a visualization of battery life involving careful gradient selection and composing images on the GPU using a custom shader.

The intuitive, live wallpapers leveraged the smarts of google technology and beautified it in a way that lived up to the Pixel’s premium nature. As the first truly premium Google device, the Pixel evokes beauty down to the very last detail. There was such excitement about the new wallpapers that a leaker posted sneak peaks on Reddit and multiple threads on how to “hack” the wallpapers for use on Apple devices surfaced. Bloomberg reported that over 552k Pixels were shipped in the fourth quarter, far exceeding Google’s expectations. Fortune noted that the Pixel outperformed Microsoft’s Huawei in early sales and gained 0.5% of the market in just 11 days. Ultimately, the Pixel’s live wallpapers helped create an iconic, desirable visual style for the brand.