Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

Published 14 minutes ago

Brandon has been involved in tech journalism since the year 2000 and was part of the OG team of XDA and Pocketnow.

Google’s Material Design has gone through multiple iterations since its introduction. It first launched with Android 5.0 and gave Google a coherent design language to apply to all of its products. The idea was simple: the pixels you interact with are like "Digital Paper" and have their own properties — they have physics, they adhere to certain rules, and it’s something that should feel alive and delightful. Google’s previous UI metaphor was the Minority Report-style Holo design that perhaps went a bit too far in terms of the digital techy aesthetic.

Then we got Material You, which more closely aligned your phone’s look with your wallpaper colors and offered larger buttons and, overall, a more playful interface.

Finally, that evolved into Material 3 Expressive, which is now present on most Pixel devices and is now even more personal, expressive, and playful. I’ve been trying to get the most out of Material 3 Expressive on my Pixel 10 Pro, and I’ve discovered some tricks to making things look as good as possible.

It’s all about wallpaper

Your starting point

Material 3 Expressive determines system colors (which impacts everything from icon color to keyboard theme and more) based on your wallpaper. The way this works is once you change your wallpaper, you can press and hold on the homescreen and go to Wallpaper and Style. From here, scroll down to Colors (where Android will show you five color palettes based on your wallpaper). This color palette will permeate the entire OS down to the color theme of the keyboard and system menus. You can take this another step by having your homescreen icons reflect the new palette by going to the Icons setting of Wallpaper and Style, and picking "Themed Icons."

The latest Pixel launcher comes with many great wallpaper choices, but if you want a recommendation for a third-party wallpaper solution with plenty of Material Design-inspired choices, we recommend WallRod (it costs $0.99, but that fee includes access to hundreds of minimalist wallpapers that fantastically fit into Material 3 Expressive):

Wallpaper Effects and Wallpaper Studio

One of the most interesting and key new features of Material 3 Expressive is Wallpaper Effects, which lets you really leverage your wallpaper with Shape effects (which will cleanly make a cut-out of your wallpaper with a specific shape — great for a minimalist vibe), Weather effects (which will apply realistic weather animations in front of your wallpaper, including an option to use local weather data so that when it’s raining where you are, there are realistic "rain drops" that form on your wallpaper) and Cinematic, which will slightly animate your wallpaper and make it come alive on your homescreen.

In order to use Wallpaper Effects, it’s a little bit hidden. Just press and hold the homescreen, go to Wallpaper and Style, then pick More Wallpapers, and Wallpaper Studio. From there, you can toggle between the three Wallpaper Effects. Just an important note: if you’re using a third-party wallpaper app, in order to use Wallpaper Studio, you must first save the wallpapers to which you want to apply the effect to your device.

If you’re using a third-party wallpaper app, in order to use Wallpaper Studio with Wallpaper Effects on new wallpapers, you must first save the wallpaper you want to use to your device

Something to be mindful of: like Live Wallpapers (which essentially lets you play wallpaper "video" on your homescreen) on Android, using the weather or cinematic wallpaper effect will have a small negative impact on your battery because your homescreen will always have to play a short video if you pick one of these effects.

Pick widgets that match the Material 3 Expressive Look

I love widgets, but they have to match the aesthetic and be functional. I use very few widgets, mostly from Google, as I want to maintain consistency with Material 3 Expressive. In terms of first-party widgets, you can’t go wrong with Google Weather, Google Keep, and Google Clock, all of which have beautiful Material 3 Expressive widgets. All of these apps and their widgets should be pre-installed on your Pixel.

Credit: Google Play

If you want some third-party widgets that match Material 3 Expressive, there’s one we’d recommend called Material You Widgets. While it’s $0.99, it gives you access to over 300 widgets, all of which match the Material 3 Expressive look. The main downside to this app is that the widgets really can’t be customized, but they do support light and dark mode.

Other Settings

It’s all about the small tweaks

Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf

There are numerous settings in the Pixel launcher so that you can tweak things to your heart’s content. I’ll go over a couple of changes I made to settings to clean up my launcher a bit:

• At a Glance: off. While you still can’t fully remove At a Glance (come on, Google!), you can make it a lot smaller now by disabling it. While it is sometimes helpful and context-aware (like it can show you if you have an upcoming appointment, give you bedtime reminders, and sometimes give you travel info), for me, it mostly only shows weather, which is redundant with the Google Weather widget I like to use. So disabling this gives you a cleaner homescreen and more space to work with.
• Suggestions. Pixel can suggest apps both in the app drawer and on the homescreen "based on recently used apps, most-used apps, and routines", which in principle sounds nice, but I never found it to be useful and to just take up precious space.

Material 3 Expressive is about color, consistency, and minimalism

There are a few key principles to making a clean and consistent homescreen design on your Pixel. First is color, which starts from your wallpaper: pick a wallpaper that has colors that you vibe with. You want bright and bold, pick something colorful, or perhaps you want something more chill, then go with more subdued colors. Second is consistency. Using the Pixel’s icon theming option instantly matches all of your icons (and system UI elements!) to the accent colors as determined by your wallpaper. And lastly, Material You is inherently minimal and simple. This means not making your homescreen a dumping ground for all of your apps, but truly a dashboard of apps you use regularly with a handful of widgets that provide you with meaningful, glanceable information.