The I.T Massive!

In this article I am going to show you how easy it is to create your own custom Windows 7 Themes.

It is easy to create your own custom themes on Windows 7. First off go to the Personalization Screen in the Control Panel. This can be done by either clicking Start, Control Panel then clicking Personalization or by right clicking the desktop and clicking Personalize.

Once in the Personalize window all you need to do is modify your current Theme by either changing the Desktop Background, Window Color, Sounds or the Screen Saver.

Desktop Background

To start creating the Theme we are going to click on the Desktop Background (lower left icon) to start the customization.

From here we can customize the Desktop Background in a few different ways. The first option we have is at the top of the window called Picture Location. There are some preset picture locations, these include Windows Desktop Backgrounds, Pictures Library, Top Rated Photos, Solid Colors and Sample Pictures. If the picture location you want is not there you can click the browse button and browse to the pictures you would like. I decided to go with a few of the Sample Pictures for my custom Theme.

The next set of options you have is at the bottom of the screen. First is the Picture Position option. This option allows you to change the position of the background picture, the options include Fill, Fit, Stretch, Title and Center. The Change Picture Every option is used if you would like multiple background pictures, the time ranges between every 10 seconds to every day, you can also shuffle the background pictures by ticking the shuffle box. Lastly there is a check box called When using battery power, pause the slide show to save power, I am not too sure how much power you would save but it's handy for laptops I suppose.

Once you have set up everything to your liking just click save changes, this will return you to the Personalize screen. As you will see in the picture below you will now have a Theme in the My Theme section.

Window Color

Next up we are going to modify the Window Color. To do this simply click Window Color at the bottom of the screen which will open the Window below.

You can select from the color presets by simply clicking the colored boxes. As it says at the top of the window this will change the color of your window borders, Start Menu and your Taskbar. For my Theme I chose the frost colour (bottom right). There are a few more customization options, firstly you can enable or disable the transparency effect by ticking or unticking the Enable Transparency box. You can also change the Color intensity to by sliding the color intensity slider, if you move it to the left there color gets less intense and to the right it gets more intense. If you don't like the colours that you see you can create your own custom one by clicking on Show Color Mixer, from there you can adjust the Hue, Saturation and Brightness. There is also an Advanced Appearance Settings option to click but we don't really need it for this segment. Once you have made your color adjustments simply click Save Changes.

Sound Scheme

The next Theme feature we are going to adjust is the sound scheme. Simply click sounds at the bottom of the Personalize window. This will bring up the sound options as seen below.

At the top of the Window there are several tabs, the only on we are concerned about (and the one that comes up by default) is the Sounds tab. The first options that we have is to select our sound scheme. There are loads of sound schemes in Windows 7 for those that are interested the sound schemes are: Afternoon, Calligraphy, Characters, Cityscape, Delta, Festival, Garden, Heritage, Landscape, No Sounds, Quirky, Raga, Savanna, Sonata and Windows Default. I decided to choose the Garden sound scheme.

If your not a fan of any of the sound schemes then you can create your own if you would like. To do this click on any one of the sounds under Program Events then go down to sounds, you can change the sound to one of the other of the Theme's sound by clicking on the Sounds drop down menu. If you would like to use your own sound then click on browse and then browse to the sound you would like. Once you have done this you'll see your current sound scheme name will have (modified) beside the name. Once you have customised all your sounds click on save as and name it what you like then click apply.

Screen Saver

Now we move on to the last configuration, the screen saver. From the Personalization window click on Screen Saver Settings, this will bring up the screen saver window below.

From here you have several different screen savers you can choose from. These are (none), 3D Text, Blank, Bubbles, Mystify, Photos and Ribbons. I decided to pick Mystify for my custom theme. Some of the screen savers have custom settings, to access these just click the Settings.... button, we won't go into details about the different settings for each screen saver in the article but you can experiment around with them if you want. The Preview button allows you to preview the screen saver. You can set the amount of time the computer will activate the screen saver if it is left idle by adjusting the wait time, this can be set between 1 and 9999 minutes. There is also a handy check box called "On resume, display logon screen" this is great if you have set your account a password as no one can come along and just hop on to your computer once the screen saver has kicked in unless they know your password of course. Once that is all done then click apply.

Saving your Theme

Now you should be back to the Personalization window and the options you have configured should be there along the bottom. If you have been following my example options that I picked then your Personalization screen should look something like below.

To recap the options that I picked were Slide Show for the Desktop Background, Frost for the Window Color, Garden for the Sounds and Mystify for the Screen Saver. 

Now that all the work is done we are going to save our Theme, to do this simply right click the Theme under the My Themes section and click Save Theme. I called my Theme Animals as you can see in the screenshot.

Bonus Material

If you would like to get more Themes you can download some from Microsoft's website to do this either click get more themes online from the personalization screen or click here.

If you would like to download my example theme just click here.

Also check out my other articles Sharing Windows 7 Themes, Windows 7: The RC Themes and Windows 7: Beta Styles.