There is a ton of prime real estate on your Twitter page that many users don’t even bother with. We are of course talking about your Twitter background image.
Twitter has a few easy to use options in the settings page that allows you to customise your colour scheme and background, but to really make the most of your Twitter background, you should look into designing your own custom image.
The good news is that it’s not too difficult, but there are some things to consider – we give you the step-by-step guide!
1. Get an image editor
You’ll need something that allows you to easily edit an image with a couple of more sophisticated tools. Paint just won’t cut it! A tool like Photoshop is ideal, but is also very pricey. Thankfully there are a number of free alternatives including Gimp, Picassa and even Photoshop Online. Gimp is our favourite, but Photoshop has the advantage that there is nothing to install as it is online.
2. Layout your canvas
The most important thing to be careful of is the size of your image. The column that contains your tweets will always take up about 760 pixels of the screen (pixels – also shortened to px are the standard measurement metric for web images and will be the default in the image editing programs mentioned above).
The problem is that the amount of space either side of this central column will depend on the size and resolution of the person’s screen that is viewing your page. Everyone viewing your profile will see it a little differently. The best option is to go for a background size of 1680 x 1200 pixels. The image resolution should be the standard 72 dpi.
If this sounds confusing, then you might like to download a template. There are several examples on the web, but you can try this one.
3. Get designing
You obviously need to leave room for the 760 pixel center column. In addition to this, the amount of room you have on the left will depend on the size of your visitors monitor or screen. The safe bet here is to leave about 200 pixels – this should be the standard for most people.
You also need to leave about 65 pixels at the top for the Twitter logo.
The rest if yours to play with! Some things to remember:
- Focus on the top left – this is where your users’ eyes will focus
- Keep your branding in line with your corporate colours
- Don’t over clutter your background
- Nothing is clickable, so avoid including links on your background
- Often, less is more!
- Remember to go to the settings page and tweak the rest of the colours on your page to match your background
- The maximum file size for uploads is 800kb, so make sure your image size is less than this
And that’s it! Let us know how you get on and share the background images that you think really work!
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