Creating a Custom Twitter Background
Up until last year, it was pretty easy to use your background image space on Twitter to market yourself. Instead of using one of the generic backgrounds provided by Twitter, you could create your own, customized, spiffy, Twitter background. Mine looks like this:
But then they launched New Twitter. New Twitter is better, it has two columns and is much more rich in terms of features and benefits. BUT it takes up more space on the screen, and suddenly everyone's carefully designed Twitter backgrouds were obliterated.
This month, I partner with John McLachlan of Full Bleed Arts Marketing, who is a graphic designer, to show you how to create a nifty new New Twitter Background that will be viewable by everyone.
You'll need Photoshop for this, or some other graphic manipulation pogram. If you don't want to invest in Photoshop, try Gimp for free.
Step 1: Open up your program and create a new image with the dimensions of 2560 pixels wide by 1600 pixels high. (Note from John: This is quite a large image size, but it’s needed so that even if someone is viewing your Twitter page on a large monitor, the background will likely cover all of that screen real estate (space).)
Step 2: Choose a background colour. You might want to brand it the same colour as your website, or you can choose a pattern, but I think a solid might be less busy.
Step 3: Navigate to the top left of the image and create a guide at the 200 pixel mark in your ruler. This 200-pixel area is the area that you have to play with--anything beyond will likely be covered.
Step 4: If you have a logo, import it into the file now and place it near the upper left corner.
Step 5: Now add information: you can put in contact info (ie: Facebook, LinkedIn, Blog, etc), or you can say a bit about who you are and what you do. Remember that there is already a fairly large profile pic of you on your Twitter profile, and your website's URL should be there, too, so you don't need to repeat them here, but you may if you wish. You could also change the text direction so that it reads from the bottom of the page up to the top of the page when you tip your head to the right.
Step 6: After you're done putting in all your information, save your file. In PhotoShop this is done by choosing File > Save for Web.
Here's a screencast of how to upload your new background to your Twitter account.
Wanna see my new fancy Twitter Background? Click here.
And I'd love to see yours when you get it done.
Until next month,
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