Welcome to the HTC theme of the week, a series where I spotlight a theme I’ve found in the HTC Theme app, from a user I follow, a recommended theme, or eventually ones I’ve made myself. The Themes app runs on phones with HTC Sense 6 or higher and has a huge gallery of user contributed designs with custom wallpapers, icons, sounds and more.

This week’s theme is called FANTASTIC FICTION and was a random find in the new themes recommendations section. The theme has a light wallpaper accompanied by bright turquoise custom icons that bleed over to the color scheme. FANTASTIC FICTION is loud, but in a subtle way; I think it’s the eye on the wallpaper that keeps you focused.

FANTASTIC FICTION Theme Pros

FANTASTIC FICTION stood out as a different type of theme to me. So far I’ve covered seasonal, material, gamer, and super hero themes and this had a level of hype the others have been missing. The most visual aspect to this theme is the eye on the wallpaper and explosion of running colors across the screen. The same wallpaper is used throughout the theme and it has so much going on that when you transition from screen to screen you get a chance to see something new on the layout of apps and widgets on your home screens.

This theme comes with a few custom icons that replace the default HTC and Google app icons. These icons are round with a bright turquoise background and the app is depicted in a minimalist white. The weather icons are also white and the main clock has white numbers with a slanting line to separate hours and seconds. The color scheme matches the app icon background.

There are custom soft keys, a custom keyboard, and custom caller window, but those don’t show up on my One M8; they’re visible on the One M9 and newer phones with the latest version of HTC Sense.

I really appreciate that the designer added custom sounds too, but I’ll talk about them in the next section.

FANTASTIC FICTION Theme Cons

A few cool points are lost for only having the one wallpaper, but the fact that the design is so cool keeps it in the party. I like the bright, round app icons, but the rest of my apps are missing some design. I wish they could have at least had a rounded overlay the same size as the custom set.

I get really excited when I see that a theme has custom sounds, because it gives me the impression up front that the designer was inspired to add musical notes that should contribute to the theme. Unfortunately for this theme I had to change the ringtone, notification tone, and alarm. Each one was terrible for me in different ways. The ringtone was a boy band song that I wouldn’t feel comfortable answering in public and the notification sound was similar to a tone I recently set for new tweets, but lasted much too long for a simple incoming message.

And then there’s the alarm. Well. It was just loud, obnoxious, and upset my wife the times it went off before I remembered to change it. This alarm got me in trouble with the wifey!

About the theme designer

After you hear more about the designer you may start to understand where some of the choices were coming from, especially the sounds.

Erdem describes himself as a 16 year with a HTC One M8 who loves technology, coding, music, and making themes. In his catalog there are approximately 4 themes, a bunch of wallpapers and unique sounds clips.

The FANTASTIC FICTION theme was added last month and has been downloaded 4438 times. Head over to Erdem’s profile and browse his collect to show some support for the younger crowd out there making an impact on the community.

About my theme review criteria

When selecting themes to review in this column I look for themes that are complete and look like they have a lot to offer.

So what does a complete theme look like?

A complete theme has a collection of wallpapers, as many custom app icons as possible with the rest styled and/or textured, custom weather and clock icons, custom soft keys, modified keyboard, custom fonts, and unique sounds,

That’s a lot of features, but to me, that makes a complete theme. Not all themes I review hit all the marks, but they at least have several of the items mentioned below in an effort to show you the creativity of the designers uploading to the HTC Theme app.

Theme of the Week: FANTASTIC FICTION