Grunge City Tutorial

This grunge-style minimal homescreen clearly stands out with its bold orange and brown colors. The centre of the screen includes a unique street pole image, as well as creative time, date, weather and message notifications around the image. The app drawer icon at the bottom completes the ‘arrows’ style seen throughout the homesceen.

Part 1: Applying Nova Launcher Settings

You’re going to need Nova Launcher  as your base launcher, but Apex Launcher or Holo Launcher can also be used as the setups are virtually identical.

Here’s how you should set up the launcher, start off by selecting your Menu button then Nova Settings on your homescreen:

• Set ‘Desktop Grid’ to 9×7 (or try others if this doesn’t suit you.
• “Show Shadows” and “Icon Labels” should be disabled.
• “Home Screens” should be changed so that there is only 1 screen.
• “Resize all widgets” and “Widget Overlap” should all be enabled.
• Under “Look and Feel”, disable “Show Notification Bar”
• Under “Dock”, disable “Enable Dock”.

Part 2: Adding the App Drawer & Wallpaper

First add an App Drawer icon to enable easy access to your other apps if needed. Do this by holding down on the homescreen, selecting Nova Actions – App Drawer, then place it in the bottom left corner.

- Wallpaper for a Galaxy S2

Simply use QuickPic (an alternative gallery app) to choose the wallpaper provided in the link at the bottom of this post, make sure the crop box takes up the whole wallpaper.

- Wallpaper for other phones where the one above doesn’t fit too well

Use this wallpaper if you have an S3, it should fit better than the other one provided. However if it doesn’t fit, or you have another phone that has a different resolution, try Wallpaper Wizardrii.

Once you have found the wallpaper using QuickPic or your stock Gallery, select Menu – Set As – Wallpaper Wizardrii, then select Set – More – Scale – No Scroll (if any message pops up, select continue with No Scroll as well as “Never Show me this again”.

If this doesn’t work, you might want to try other methods such as an image editor (Photoshop or GIMP) or other wallpaper apps such as MultiPicture Live Wallpaper or Image 2 Wallpaper.

Part 3: Adding in the UCCW widgets (Notifications in the middle of the screen)

You’ll need UCCW for this part, as well as copying  the skins that are provided in the link at the bottom to your phone.

To add these skins:

1. Hold down on the homescreen – Widget – UCCW – any size.
2. In the main menu after tapping the widget, select “Open uzip”, now just find where you pasted the folder and look for the  grunge1.uzip.
3. After it appears on your homesreen, resize it to the way it looks in the video.
4. Next add in grunge2.uzip, also resizing it (use a 4×2 widget size to save resizing time).
5. You can now edit the hotspots (allows you to open apps when tapping a certain area) in this skin, by tapping the skin to open it.
6. Then select ‘Hotspots’ in ‘Select Object’, followed by editing your needed hotspots.
7. If you would like to know more about hotspots, watch part 3 in our UCCW tutorial here.
8. Finally tap any UCCW skin, Menu – Hotspots Mode – On.

Remember if you can’t edit your UCCW, it means your Hotspots mode is on, and you need to turn it off by going into your UCCW app from your App Drawer. To turn Hotspots mode off select Menu – Hotspots Mode – Off.

Part 4: App Drawer Part 2

There are 2 methods for this:

- If you are using a Galaxy S2

Simply hold down on the App Drawer icon – Edit – Select the image – Find the App Drawer icon that’s provided at the bottom of this post and select it.

- If you are using another phone or you simply want the app drawer to fit better

UCCW is an extremely powerful app, so it can be used to edit the original App Drawer icon provided by GaRyArTs. First you need to open the GrungeCityAppDrawer.uzip skin and place it in the corner. If it doesn’t fit properly on your phones, open up the UCCW editor and position/resize it until it does. Now hold down on the skin – Send to back. Change your App Drawer icon to a blank.png (see bottom for link, to change the image, hold down on the App Drawer icon – Edit – Select the image – Find the blank.png provided).

If you don’t want another UCCW skin on your screen,  select the App Drawer skin to edit it, select Menu – Save/export skin – Save as image. Now once this is done, use this as your app drawer icon (use QuickPic to find it in your UCCWoutput folder), either using the standard method (see above, might have to be resized) or Desktop VisualizeR (can be resized).

Helpful links:

Grunge City on MyColorScreen
Galaxy S2 Wallpaper and UCCW widgets
Blank.png (transparent icon)
App Drawer Skin for UCCW including a sample image