You picked gold because it sounded expensive, and what came out looked like a certificate from a printer shop. That is the usual first attempt. The letters are the right colour and still nothing about them reads as metal.
The reason is that gold and chrome are not colours. They are surfaces. A yellow letter is yellow no matter where you look at it, but a real gold letter changes as it turns: bright along one edge, almost brown in the middle, a hard white glint where the light catches. Your eye knows the difference immediately even if you have never thought about it.
So the job is not picking a better shade of yellow. It is giving the letters something to reflect, and enough body to do the reflecting. That is mostly about the background and the thickness of the strokes, and both are easy to get right once you know what you are looking at.
Metal needs a dark room
Put gold on a white background and it has nothing to bounce off. The letters go flat and slightly dirty, because the parts of gold that make it look like gold are the dark parts, and dark shading on white just reads as a smudge.
On a near black or deep charcoal ground the same lettering suddenly has range. The highlights look bright because there is something dim next to them. The shadow edges look like shadow instead of grime. This is why almost every convincing metallic wallpaper you have seen sits on a dark field, and why the ones that do not tend to look like a template.
Deep colours work too if you keep them dark: navy, forest, oxblood, a very dark warm grey. What does not work is mid grey, beige, or a busy photo. Mid tones sit at the same brightness as parts of the metal, so the letters stop separating from the background and the whole thing goes muddy.
Thin gold is not gold
A hairline stroke has no room for a gradient. If the stroke is too thin to hold a gradient it can only be one colour, and one colour is paint, not metal. That is a common reason a gold name looks cheap.
Give the letters weight. A bold or heavy face, or a display serif with thick stems, gives each stroke enough width to run from dark to bright across it. That gradient is the entire illusion. Chrome needs even more room than gold because chrome is mostly about a sharp horizon line where the sky reflection meets the ground reflection, and you cannot fit a horizon into a hairline.
If you love a delicate script and do not want to give it up, keep the metal for one word and set the rest in plain white or a muted tone. A thin gold flourish next to a solid gold surname reads as deliberate. Thin gold everywhere reads as a mistake.
Gold and chrome want different names
Gold is warm and slightly formal. It suits names with weight to them, longer names, surnames, anything you would be comfortable seeing embossed on a book cover. It also suits classic letterforms, so a serif or a heavy script sits naturally in it.
Chrome is cold and modern and slightly aggressive. It suits short punchy names, all caps, tight condensed lettering. Four letters in chrome caps looks like a logo. The same four letters in ornate gold script looks like a wedding invitation. Neither is wrong, but they say different things, so pick the one that matches how you actually want the phone to feel when you glance at it.
In Name Wallpaper Maker: Neon you can type the name once and flick between the gold plate and chrome styles to see it both ways in a few seconds, which is far more useful than trying to imagine it.
Check it on the lock screen, not in the app
A preview inside any app shows the wallpaper with nothing on top of it. Your real lock screen puts a large clock across the upper middle and notifications across the bottom. Set it as your wallpaper, lock the phone, and look. If the clock cuts through the brightest part of the lettering, move the name lower or shrink it slightly. Metallic type loses its effect the moment its highlight is covered.
Shine is a seasoning, not a sauce
Sparkles, starbursts, heavy outer glow and a drop shadow all at once is what tips gold into gaudy. Each effect is trying to convince you the letters are shiny, and stacking them just tells the eye that none of them worked.
Pick one. A single sharp highlight along the top edge of the letters is usually enough. If you want a little more, a soft warm haze behind the word gives the impression of light in the room without touching the letterforms themselves. Leave the letters clean and let the background do the atmospheric work.
The same restraint applies to background texture. A subtle dark gradient, a faint vignette, or nothing at all. Marble is the exception people ask about, and it can work beautifully, but only if the marble is dark and low contrast. Bright white marble with heavy grey veining fights the letters for attention and both lose.
Give the name room to breathe
Metal looks more valuable when it is surrounded by empty space. A small gold word in the middle of a large dark field reads as an object. The same word blown up to touch both edges reads as a banner.
Aim for generous margins, at least a comfortable thumb's width of dark on the left and right. Sit the word slightly below centre so the clock has its own space and the two are not competing. If you have a first and last name, setting one large and one small, rather than both at the same size, gives the block a shape instead of a slab.
A small detail that helps more than it should: widen the letter spacing a little for all caps chrome, and leave it tight for gold script. Caps need air between them to look composed. Scripts are designed to connect and look broken when pulled apart.
Keep the screen readable
A dark wallpaper with bright letters is genuinely good for the lock screen, because the white clock has plenty of contrast against the dark ground and the metallic word occupies a different area. That is a real advantage over busy photo wallpapers.
One thing to watch is depth effect, the feature where iOS lets a subject in a photo overlap the clock. Whether it offers to do that depends on the image and your iOS version, and with flat graphic wallpapers it often will not appear at all. That is fine. If it does appear and it pushes your name behind the clock, turn it off from the wallpaper editing screen.
Also check both the always on display, if your iPhone has one, and the dimmed state. Very dark wallpapers can look almost black there, which some people love and some find lifeless. If you want a bit more presence, lift the background from pure black to a very dark grey.
Quick answers
Why does my gold text look yellow rather than gold?
Because it is a single flat colour with no dark areas. Gold reads as gold when part of the stroke is a deep bronze and part is near white. Heavier letters and a dark background give that variation somewhere to live.
Is chrome or gold better for a name with many letters?
Gold, usually. Chrome relies on a strong reflection across each letter, and that reflection gets tiny when a long name is scaled down to fit. Gold survives at smaller sizes because its warmth still reads even when the highlight is small.
Can I use a photo behind metallic lettering?
You can, but darken it heavily first and choose something without much detail behind the word itself. Photos with mid tones and busy texture cancel out the contrast that makes metal look like metal.
Will a dark metallic wallpaper drain more battery?
On iPhone models with OLED screens, darker pixels do use less power, so a mostly black wallpaper can help slightly. The effect is small, and it varies by model, so treat it as a minor bonus rather than a reason to choose the style.
Where to get it
Name Wallpaper Maker: Neon has gold plate, chrome and marble styles built in with the dark grounds and stroke weights already set up, so you can type a name and see it rendered properly rather than assembling the effect yourself. It is available on the App Store at on the App Store and gets a first version on screen quickly.
Make two, one gold and one chrome, live with each for a day, and keep the one you still like on the third glance.