Put some art into your Start.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. We love customizing our Nokia Lumias. Whether it’s a stunning new shell for our Nokia Lumia 820 or Start art made by getting creative with Windows Phone Live Tiles, customization makes your smartphone uniquely yours.

Last week, we showcased some awesome Start art we found on mytil.es. Loads of you asked how to work this creative magic, so we’ve found some apps, which help you do just that.

WizTiles

WizTiles is a fantastic tile generator, which has been around for a while. It allows you to create upto ten tiles for Windows Phone tasks. Editing screens consist of two pages, Design and Detail. Design is where you choose how the tile looks. You can create single or double sided tiles, add custom colours, pictures, create themes, or download themes from the developer.

Although it can seem a little daunting at first, once you get the hang of things it’s super simple to turn your Start screen into a thing of beauty.  To see for yourself check out this quick demo from the PhoneChap.

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Skinery

Skinery works in a similar way to WizTiles. It’s main difference is that it allows you to launch third-party apps like WhatsApp, Facebook and Nokia Music etc from custom tiles. New apps are being added every week and the developers are currently campaigning to have more added all the time.

It’s easier to get started and it’s great to have third party app tiles, but when it comes to design it’s less versatile than WizTiles. Nonetheless, you can still create some very cool looking Start screens.

 

Custom Tiles Maker

Custom Tiles Maker is ideal for creating new tiles from your pictures. You can assign specific actions to them and add a back image for when they flip. There’s also a list of precreated tiles such as compose email, send sms, search, which you can customize and pin to your start screen. While it’s pretty straightforward to use and you can create some great Start art, you might need to buy some in-app features to really enjoy to the max.

MyTileMaker

MyTileMaker’s very easy to use and makes it very easy to create tile collages of your favourite pics, whether that’s your girlfriend or Scarlett Johansson. However, these tiles are purely decorative. For more practical matters, you can also create different coloured tile memos and lists to pin on your Start screen.

We’ve been playing around with these four all week and we can safely say our Start screens are infinitely more colourful as a result. But what about you? Have you used them to make your Nokia Lumia distinctly yours or do you have another app or method?