I sometimes design wallpapers for my phone, as I suspect many artists with smartphones do. And, often, I’m trying to show these designs to friends. On my Windows Phone, though, a big problem is that a well-designed wallpaper leaves a big area of whitespace in the lower-left for the lockscreen text. Leading to the wallpaper itself looking a bit unbalanced, and not really conveying just how it looks in use. And, unless you’re running an unlocked phone and have something like Screen Capturer v3 installed, it’s impossible to get a good shot of the wallpaper as you see it. And, even if you do, that still means you have to do the trial-and error game of making the wallpaper, sending it over, applying it, checking, tweaking, and repeating.

It’s just plain old not a good system for efficient design and sharing. And, the internet shows a distinct dearth of screenshots of the Windows Phone lockscreen with a solid color background, so super-imposing the text has always been a challenge. So, to fix that, I present the first version of my WP7 Wallpaper mockup PSD. Using various screenshots of the device, icon sets, and Segoe WP, I have recreated the typical WP7 lockscreen as layers in a Photoshop document. Now, all you have to do is insert your wallpaper design under the locked layers (one a group with all the icons and text, the other a 15% black screen that is automatically applied by the phone to all wallpapers to help the white text stand out), and bam! Instant wallpaper visualization.

This is a freebie, of course, and you can download it below in CS5 format.