So I’m sure in your life of jailbreaking you’ve seen people change their icons to something different, like minimal glyphs or just a minor variation on the stock icons. This process is called theming, and it uses a tool called Winterboard, and you can download it in Cydia for free!

Now I’m sure you’ve came here to learn how to make a theme, not just hear me talk about them. To make a theme, you need:

A computer with Photoshop or some other image editing program

A jailbroken iPhone/iPod/iPad with Winterboard installed

A way to get your theme from your computer to your device (SSH, iExplorer, iFunbox, etc.)

I will be showing the process of how I made spectrel, a minimal theme that will soon be released on Cydia.

Making the icons

More important than all of the technical stuff about making the theme is, well, making the icons of course! I’ll be using Photoshop for this part of the tutorial, so if you don’t have Photoshop, everything should still be the same!

First, select File – New in your image editing program.

Name the image whatever icon you want to theme first (I’m doing the Messages icon). Change the width and the height to 1024, and click OK.

Now just make your icon using all of the artistic technique you have! If you don’t know how to use Photoshop, look it up! There’s at least a million tutorials out there that can help you!

I would recommend at this point to save the icon layered, so that you can make quick changes to it later (for photoshop just a .psd).

Now click File – Image Size if your in Photoshop. For other image editing programs, find somewhere where you can change the size of the icon.

Now, you need to resize the icon for the device that you’re theming for. Below is a table that shows all icon sizes for every device. For this tutorial however, I’ll only be theming the primary icon file for the iPhone 5.

Device Suffix Primary App Icon Spotlight Settings iPhone 6+ @3x 180×180 px 120×120 px 87×87 px Retina iPhones/iPods @2x 120×120 px 80×80 px 58×58 px Non-Retina iPhones/iPods 57×57 px 40×40 px 29×29 px Retina iPads @2x~ipad 152×152 px 80×80 px 58×58 px Non-Retina iPads ~ipad 76×76 px 40×40 px 29×29 px

After you’ve done that, open File – Save As and save the resized icon as a .png from the pull-down bar.

Making folder directories

Now go to your desktop, or location on your computer that you’ll remember, and make a new folder naming it:

yourtheme.theme

(yourtheme being the name of your theme).

Navigate into this folder and make a new folder called Bundles.

Inside of that folder, make a folder, and name it the app’s Bundle ID. A Bundle ID is basically like a codename for an app, so Winterboard knows which icons to theme what. To find what the Bundle ID of a particular app is:

Navigate to /var/stash/xxxxx/Applications/ if it’s a stock icon and /var/mobile/Applications/ if it’s a third-party icon using your favorite file browser (i.e. iFile, Filza, etc.) Open the Info.plist file, and scroll down to the key CFBundleIdentifier. The Bundle ID should look something like this:

com.company.appname

The folder you made previously now should look like this.

Now, go to where you saved the .png of the icon you made in Photoshop and copy it over to this folder.

Clock and newsstand icons are located in the folder:

com.apple.springboard

Renaming icon files

Now, navigate

This is the tedious part.

Now, you need to go back and do this whole tutorial over again for all of the apps you want to theme. A typical theme usually has somewhere between 100 and 300 icons. Once you do this, your Bundles folder should look like this:

Now, all you need to do is transfer the .theme folder to this directory on your device:

/var/stash/xxxxx/Themes/

If you don’t already know how to do his, click here to go to my post explaining how.

Now, all you need to do is apply your theme through Winterboard!

If you have any questions about this tutorial or you get stuck on anything, email me at comp0ckerr@outlook.com!