I played around a bit in Twitter and wanted to create custom background, so I could stand out a bit from the default ones. But I'm no graphical designer, so I wanted to keep it simple and add a bit of geekiness to it. For Instructions I zoomed into Google, and found several nice sites, including these:
- HOW TO: Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds @Mashable
- Twitter Background Guidelines @Croncast
First I wanted to create a new profile image (the small picture) for Twitter...
New Simple Z-Logo
I wanted to create a new "Z-logo" too, to replace the one from Aston Martin Zagato, I've been using for ages...
So I took GIMP again and played around with some colors and came up with this:
Zemalf's New, Simple Logo
The logo is now my Gravatar as well as the Zemalf's Twitter profile image.
Creating Twitter Profile Background Image
I created the basic background image in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation). I took the Twitter profile background picture sizing from Croncast, as I figured they had done the work and ended up on these numbers. These background creation guidelines are working because with these the information can be seen by most users with different screen sizes, and still look reasonably good for all of them:
- File Dimensions: 2048 px by 1707 px
- Branding Dimensions: 80 px by 587 px
- Coordinates: X=20, Y=14
- Horizontal position: 20 px from the left
- Vertical position: 14 px from the top
After creating the background image (more and less solid color), I created this masterpiece to go at the top left corner of the new Twitter Background:
Picture created with online Commodore 64 emulator and some clever GIMPing (image editing)
After combining the solid color background and this picture, I added my new Z-logo to the background and added the URL on the left to promote my blog as well (like the Commodore 64 loading screen wasn't doing it already, but anyway). I didn't test the background too much different screensizes, but I think I should do it at some point when I do more serious attempt on the customized background. The C64 screen on top left will go "under" the main twitter interface on smaller screens, but I don't mind that with this one.
Here's the full Twitter background image I created (and of course, you can see it on my Twitter profile too):
The image is huge in resolution, but not so big on size because it is mostly solid color.
So there's the first version ready and in use now. I'm thinking about going a bit further with the C64 theme and creating full background with just the C64 screen, but I'll work on that after seeing the feedback from this current image. As said, I didn't want to go and try to do anything too fancy, but I like how it turned out...
What do you think about the new Twitter background and the logo?
