The HTC Dream, also known as the T-Mobile G1 in the States, was the first commercially available Android mobile phone. It only recently came here to Canada, and was our (Lifeline's) handset of choice when we recently upgraded from Blackberries.  The HTC Dream has streamlined a lot of mobile processes for us and saved us significant costs on our monthly bills, mainly because we already use Google Apps for email and calendar scheduling.  We highly recommend Google Apps as an email / collaboration tool, but that's a topic for  an entirely different blog post.  Getting a new phone isn't all work and no play though,  if you're a geek like me... half the fun is setting up your new phone and finding out what new features can help your productivity.

Yesterday evening, I decided to "brand" my phone to Lifeline a bit more, and made a custom wallpaper for the phone:

When two rows of icons are setup, the logo fits nicely between them. I'm pretty happy with my handiwork, but it got me thinking that maybe other people out there would like to create a background for their G1 with their company logo on it, so I've created a Photoshop source file along with some explanation below to show you how to create your own!

First of all, take a look at the image below, it's a picture of the source file (not to scale):

In the actual source file, the coloured lines are just set up as guides, but for the example image I've coloured them to help make the explanation easier.

The red line is the middle of the entire wallpaper, so you'd want your logo to be centered horizontally on this line. The while lines represent the edge of the main screen. If you have an HTC-Dream, you'll know that you can switch to alternate pages of icons on the left and right. For example, if I switched to the alternate icon page on the left side, then the phone would display from the left edge of the image all the way to the red line in the center.

The green lines represent the vertical space you'll want to fit your logo in to allow a row of icons above and below your logo without obstructing or crowding it. So, you'll want to fit your logo in the area shaded blue. The Photoshop file has a black background currently, but feel free to change it to anything you'd like! You can download it by clicking here.

Have fun making your own HTC-Dream wallpapers!