Twitter Custom Background

Here’s a brief guide to creating a customer twitter background.  I put one together – I’m not completely happy with it but I wanted to experiment with it – see https://twitter.com/andrewhelpme for what it looks like at present.  Here are the basic steps I took to make one:

1. I started with a basic rectangle that was 1600 x 1200 – so that it fills most monitor screens without repeating.
2. I added in a 200 pixel wide rectangle on the left.  This represents the maximum size my custom sidebar can take up. (I left this in place for demonstration purposes).
3. I then added a rectangle as the background.  In my case I picked a color off the header of my website (a bluish color).  I then picked a gradient option for that fill color and played around with gradient points to get a decent look.
4. I then started adding my own content:
   • I put a picture of me in the upper left-hand corner (unfortunately this doesn’t look as good as I hoped)
   • I put the logo of my corporation toward the bottom
   • I added in a catch phrase for my businesss
   • I put my website name vertically along the side
5. Here is the initial version of the background:
6. I wasn’t happy how that came out so I played around with it some more.
   • I made my picture smaller as it was too grainy.
   • I moved the website name to the top so it’s along the left edge – but starting from the top.
   • I made the logo smaller and moved it underneath the picture.
   • I then made a box around my picture, logo, etc. that had no interior but a hazy white exterior.
   • I removed the corporate log – as it was extraneous
   • I also then applied a “pattern” to the background rectangle to make it more interesting.
7. Here is the 2nd version of my custom twitter background

I did all my graphic editing in Macromedia Fireworks (now owned by Adobe) – but you could do this in pretty much any picture editing suite – except for paint.  I’m definitely not a graphics designer – so I’m trying something pretty simple…

Here are some other guides I found:

http://www.twitip.com/custom-twitter-backgrounds/

http://www.mytweetspace.com/