What we mean by solid
A solid on this site is a field first. It can have a tiny face, a crease of plaster, or a soft stain, but the phone should still read as one color when you squint. That is different from a poster floral or a landscape with a horizon. If you came here for a plain lock screen that does not argue with a clock, you are in the right collection.
We do not ship a single hex filled to the edges and call the job done. A perfectly flat PNG looks cheap on an OLED and shows every fingerprint. The tan earth-tone stroke keeps a little pigment so the field feels like paint, not a settings-app swatch. Mint faces and smileys used to sit here; they now live on Pastel, because a face is a mark, not a solid.
When a solid is the right download
Use a solid on a home screen. Icons stay readable. Notification badges stay visible. A widget clock does not sit on a flower. Clock numerals and labels still need contrast against the field — WCAG 2.2 and Apple’s HIG both use a 4.5:1 floor.[1][2] Material Design 3 keeps surfaces and accent content on different roles for the same reason.[5] If your launcher already uses a blur or a dark scrim, a solid still wins because the scrim has something even to sit on.
Use a solid on a lock screen only if you like emptiness. Some people do. Most people who tap a landscape or a splash on this site want something to look at when the phone is idle. Pair a solid at home with a subject on the lock screen. The choosing guide walks through that split.
How we pick which files land here
A file gets this tag if you could describe it in one color word after three seconds and there is no character sitting on it. Tan stroke: tan. That is the current grid. Split cream-and-teal plaster stays on Teal and Neutral because it is two fields, not one solid.
We do not list kawaii faces, smileys, florals, or the paint splash here. Faces are pastel. Flowers are flower. The splash is a poster on the homepage. If you wanted a cute mint lock screen, open Pastel.
Brown, black, and “just a hex”
People search solid brown and solid black as if we had a hardware-store chip rack. Week one of the library is painterly: tan and cream, navy that reads as a dark field, a white ground with a mark. A dead #000000 slide is easy to make and ugly to live with. We would rather you use the darkest navy brushstroke, or wait until we publish a black that still has grain.
If you need a true white or true black for a screenshot backdrop, your operating system already has that. This collection is for living on a phone, not for a keynote.
OLED and solids
A mid mint or a mid tan is gentler on OLED than a paper-white field. Samsung’s OLED care notes flag static images and UI chrome; independent tests still find more permanent retention on OLED than on LCD.[3][4] A crushed black solid can stamp status-bar icons if you never change it. Rotate, or pick a navy that already has a sky wash so the top of the panel is not a single dead pixel value.
Read the OLED note if your phone already shows keyboard ghosts. A new solid will not repair that. It can stop you adding a second ghost on top.[3]
A week of living on solids
I ran the tan earth-tone stroke on the home screen and the navy-to-sky file on the lock screen for a week. Unlocking in a dark kitchen, the navy did not flash the room. Opening the grid at a desk, the tan did not fight pale gray icons. That is the job. When I swapped in the splash poster for a day, every red badge disappeared into drips and I put it back.
If your launcher already paints a dark blur behind icons, a solid still helps because the blur has an even color to sample. A meadow sampled into that blur becomes olive mud. That is a practical reason this collection exists next to Flower, not instead of it.
When we add more solids they will be new surfaces — a grainy grey, a dusty peach, a flat red with tooth — not a kawaii face slid back onto this page. If you need a chip rack of fifty hexes, use your OS.