Designing around the iPhone X display notch when designing custom wallpapers can be a little annoying if you aren’t exactly sure how much of your graphic it’ll hide. The Mac Observer has a template that takes out the guess work, and it’s free to download.
The notch is the back area at the top of the iPhone X display where the front-facing cameras and Face ID sensors sit. The image on the display wraps up on either side of the notch making the horns. You can see your wallpaper in the horns, but not the notch.
The template we designed is the size you need for iPhone X wallpaper (1125 x 2436) with the notch area blacked out, just as it is on the phone’s display. It’s a PNG so you can open it in your favorite image editor and get to work on your wallpaper masterpiece.
We’ve had good luck with our custom wallpapers so far, although if you move them around or resize them while setting your lock screen and Home screen images they don’t snap back into place like the graphics Apple includes with the phone. There’s also a Reddit thread where people are talking about distortion with image scaling, although we haven’t experienced that problem.
Once your new wallpaper image is ready to go you’ll need to get it onto your iPhone X. AirDrop works great for that, or you can email it to yourself. Once it’s on your iPhone, go to Settings > Wallpaper where you can set it as your Lock Screen image, Home Screen image, or both.