30
May
2009
Customize Your Twitter Page (Part 1)
Once of the things I most frequently get asked is “how can I customize the look of my Twitter page?” Whether you just want your page to look attractive or you want to actively utilize Twitter to increase your brand, customizing your page is a “must” in order to get noticed and be remembered.
The following is Part I where I describe how to create a custom image to use for your Twitter background in three simple steps using Adobe Photoshop.
A) Color your background
- In Adobe Photoshop, go to the “file” menu, choose “new”, give the image you are creating a name (e.g. Twitter_background) and set your image size with a width of 1250 and a height of 1000. Click “ok”
- Click on the “rectangle” selection tool and then click on the color selector and choose a color for your background. Click “ok”
- Using the rectangle selection tool, select your entire image area and it will automatically fill with the color you selected. (you can additionally play with textures, gradients, etc. if you wish)
B) Add your photo
- Now, it’s time to browse for the photo on your computer that you’d like to drop into your background. Go to “file” menu, choose “open”, locate a photo of yourself on your computer that you want to use. Click “open”
- Then, using the arrow tool, click and hold on the image of yourself and drag it and release it onto your background.
- Reduce or expand the size of your photo, by dragging the corner and then move your photo to the top left of your background image. Once you’ve placed it where you want it, click the “accept” check mark in the top bar of Photoshop.
C) Add your name, website address, contact information
- Click the “T” tool to type text underneath your photo. I recommend using black or white –whichever shows up nicely with the background color you’re using.
- Type in your name, URL, company name, tagline, contact info – whatever information you’d like displayed on your Twitter profile.
- Once you’ve typed your info, you can place it more precisely by clicking the arrow tool and sliding the whole text area exactly where you want it. You may need to grab the right vertical edge of your text area and pull it to the left to narrow your text a bit.
- Save your image as a .jpg. I recommend saving it to your desktop to easily locate it when you upload it to your Twitter profile.
You’re now ready to upload!
- Go to the “Settings” link in the top right corner of your Twitter page.
- Go to the “Design” tab
- Choose “Change background image” and click “Browse” to locate the “Twitter_background.jpg” image you just created. Upload your image and click “save changes”. (Make sure the “tile” box isn’t ticked or your image will repeat.)
- Voila!
In Part II, I will discuss in more using Twitter themes and other Twitter customization tools.
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