How to create Windows 7/8/10 Themes?

If you want to create some themes in Windows 7, you have to know that Microsoft made creating and sharing themes really simple, thanks to a new file format “.themepack”, which is basically a special ZIP format that includes cursors, sounds, wallpapers, icons, colors and more.

First of all, to create Windows 7 themes open your “Personalize” Control Panel. To do that right-click on your desktop and click on “Personalize”:

On the following windows, you will be able to create, customize and share Windows 7 themes.

The highlighted items are the most important entries. You can change “Desktop Background”, “Windows Color”, “Sounds”, “Screensaver”, “Desktop Icons” and “Mouse Pointers”.

Overview: How to create a Windows 7 theme

To create a real Windows 7 theme, you have to change a lot of things. It requires a lot of work and will take some time if you are creating a Windows 7 theme for the very first time.

To make it easier for you, you can jump to each part of the the tutorial here:

1. How to change Windows 7 Wallpaper
2. How to change Windows 7 Color Scheme
3. How to change Windows 7 Sounds
4. How to change Windows 7 Icons
5. How to change Windows 7 Cursors

If you are done with customizing your Windows 7 theme, you finally want to save and share your theme:


6. How to save Windows 7 Themes
7. How to share Windows 7 Themes

1. How to change Windows 7 Wallpaper

First, we will change the Windows 7 Wallpaper. For this example, I downloaded a few abstract Wallpapers (you will find plenty of wallpapers on our site here).

I downloaded the wallpapers to E:/abstract:

Next, I’m going to click on the link “Desktop Background” on our Personalization Control Panel:

I’ll browse to the folder E:/abstract and select it. Once you confirmed the folder, you can define a picture position. I usually select “Stretch” from the dropdown field (highlighted), because it will stretch smaller wallpapers to fit my entire screen (a widescreen 19″):

Click on save changes and we are done with step 1 (changing our Windows 7 desktop wallpaper)!

We now have created our first unsaved Windows 7 theme! The first step of creating a Windows 7 theme has been completed.

How to change Window 7 color scheme

We can now change the Window color to fit the desktop background. Because most of our abstract wallpaper seem to be dark and green, I will select a darker Window color:

Before:

I decided for a dark green with a low color intensity:

If you like playing around with colors (like me), then you can open the Color mixer and create new Window colors. Ok, now we have a new desktop wallpaper and a different Window color!

After:

But of course, we want to customize it a little bit more. Let’s proceed to the next step and change the sounds.

How to change Windows 7 sounds

As usual, click on the link “Sounds”:

Here, you will find all saved Windows 7 sound schemes:

Most of our themes come with new sound themes, which can be changed and customized here. If you want to apply a new sound file for “Critical Stop”, you simply click on “Browse” and locate the sound file that you want to assign for this error.

You can apply any WAV sound files as a replacement sound for:
“Asterisk”, “Close Program”, “Critical Battery Alarm”, “Critical Stop”, “Default Beep”, “Device Connect”, “Device Disconnect”, “Device Failed to Connect”, “Exclamation”, “Exit Windows”, “Low Battery Alarm”, “Maximize”, “Menu Command”, “Menu Pop-up”, “Minimize”, “New Fax Notification”, “New Mail Notification”, “Open Program”, “Print Complete”, “Program Error”, “Question”, “Restore Down”, “Restore Up”, “Select”, “Show Toolbar Band”, “System Notification”, “Windows Change Theme”, “Windows Logoff”, “Windows Logon”, “Windows User Account Control”, “Blocked Pop-up Windows”, “Complete Navigation”, “Empty Recycle Bin”, “Fax error”, “Fax sent”, “Feed Discovered”, “Incoming call”, “Information Bar”, “Move Menu Item”, “Search Provider Discovered”, “Start Navigation”.

Often you will also be able to customize sounds for special applications like iTunes or VNCviewer for example. So, there are quite a lot of sound files that you can change and customize.

If you are new to this, I would start with the most important sounds:
Asterisk, Critical Stop and Default Beep

Where can I download WAV sound files for my Windows 7 theme?
You can find, search and download sound files for Windows 7 here:
www.ilovewavs.com/
www.moviewavs.com/

There are many sites out there, where you can download WAV files. You should also be looking for sound files that are SHORT, because it would be pretty annoying to hear a 12 minute long sound every time you receive an error message.

How to change Windows 7 icons

To create a really cool Windows 7 theme, we are going to change our Windows 7 icons

For our theme we need some new .ico files. “.ico” is the Windows file format for icons. All Windows icons are saved as .ico files. So, you will have to convert some images to .ico files before you can use them.

At the website http://www.iconspedia.com/ you will find many .ico files that are free for personal use. So download some icons for our new theme. Personally, I like to convert images to .ico files. So, I will downloaded a “blue peace” icon for our theme. With a photo-editing tool of your choice you should remove all the white space and save it as a transparent .png file.

After removing all the white areas, I came up with this transparent desktop icon:

Next, I convert the bluepeace.png file via http://www.convertico.com/ to a .ico file that I can then use a a desktop file.

Select the “Computer” icon and click on “Browse” and locate your new .ico files.

Voilà, I assigned my “blue peace” icon:

How to change Windows 7 Cursor

The Windows file format for cursors is “.cur” or “.ani”. Keep in mind, .cur files are static cursors, while .ani files are animated Windows 7 cursors. 

To change your Windows 7 cursor, click on “Change mouse pointers”:

On the following screen, you can assign a new cursor for every mouse pointer. There are plenty of mouse pointers, but if you don’t want to change them all, you can only change a few of them.

In this example, we are only going to change one of them:

How to save Windows 7 themes

Ok, we changed our wallpapers, colors, sounds, icons and cursors. Next, we want to save our newly created Windows 7 theme.

Windows 7 introduced a new file format called .themepack, it allows you to create zipped Windows 7 themes that contain all of the files that we just changed. Great, huh? Yep it is a real time-saver! Creating themes becomes REALLY easy.

1. To do that, we right-click on our unsaved theme, click on “Save theme” and enter a name for your theme.

2. After saving your new theme, right-click on it again and this time click on “Save theme for sharing”:

Now, Windows 7 will create a package of all our files (cursors, sounds, icons, wallpaper, colors) and create your first Windows 7 theme. It will save this theme as a “.themepack”.

Now you can send this .themepack file to all of your friends and they can install by double-clicking on the file! 
Note: This won’t work on Vista. If you try to install .themepack files, you first have to extract all file and then install them manually.