Custom Twitter Backgrounds
Oct 27th, 2009 by Jason Wagner
I have dabbled in creating twitter backgrounds for myself, friends, and family, as well as the corporate Twitter account for my company. Much of what I learned about creating custom backgrounds came from here, but really its all about trial and error. In the age of multiple display resolutions and preferences- I prefer a background that fades- of course everyone is different, but here are my key points to a successful Twitter background…
1) Keep it under 800K in size. This is Twitter’s rule, not mine.
2) NEVER tile your twitter background. Unless you are doing a pattern that works well with tiling, DONT DO IT! you will always see edges and people will wonder… why. I would go blank before I tiled an image of my dog or something else across my background.
3) All layouts start from the top left corner. Twitter doesn’t care what your screen resolution is. It’s going to recognize the top left corner and everything else after that is just extra icing on the cake. For this reason specifically I like to fade to a color from left to right, and then change the background base color to match the right/bottom most edge of the background image. This way if the screen resolution is larger than my image it fades nicely without harsh edges. Bottom edges are OK, but side edges are a no-no.
4) It’s all in the Photoshop baby! Everything I do, I can do in about 1 hour of photoshop work. Fading, layers, texture, graphics, etc. are much more easily accomplished when you have this or a similar program. I use Photoshop Elements- it works just as well as the full blow version and costs fractions of what you would pay for the whole thing. If you want it- look for last years version. If you are learning its not going to be a big deal if you dont have the most current version.
5) Don’t forget the other things- Text, lines, border colors, link colors, etc- it all counts.
6) Contact me- if all else fails and you don’t like what you have, call/email/tweet, whatever- get ahold of me and I will take a look at what you got and suggest some ideas. It helps if I know you otherwise I will be throwing darts in the dark. Right now I dont charge for backgrounds- I work on referrals and networking. Mi Casa Su Casa (er- background) anyway- if I do a background for you, be appreciative- give credit where credit is due, and if you ever run across anyone that could use my services in architecture- please be a raving fan of me personally- the work will follow.
That being said- here are some examples of what I have done…
