Pulp To Pixels

Seri­ous Twit­ter users know you need to change more than just link col­ors to trans­form Twit­ter into a branded mar­ket­ing tool—the Twit­ter back­ground can become a key expres­sion of a brand.

Whether you’re new to Twit­ter or just never both­ered tak­ing the time to cre­ate a cus­tom back­ground now is the per­fect time to have a go at it.

You might be ask­ing your­self if mak­ing a cus­tom back­ground is worth the time and effort. As with any other piece or medium which rep­re­sents your brand, your Twit­ter page should be imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able to your users. It also gives you the oppor­tu­nity to add items not nor­mally dis­played on you’re Twit­ter page such as con­tact infor­ma­tion, dis­play a new prod­uct or sale, or even a short bio.

Free resources

To jump start the process, Fuel Your Cre­ativ­ity blog has posted a great tem­plate and licensed it under the Cre­ative Com­mons 3.0 terms so you can hit the ground running.

Down­load the free PSD tem­plate.

Maybe you’re not a Pho­to­shop aficionado—you’re in luck. We’ve cob­bled together a few apps and ser­vices which can sim­plify the process for you. We have not used nor tested any of these solu­tion so YMMV.

 

• MyTweet­Space is a sim­ple way to cre­ate a Twit­ter back­ground with min­i­mal effort. Prices range from free to $89. (The free tem­plate above looks more entic­ing now, eh?)
• Free Twit­ter Designer is a web app image edi­tor which can auto­mat­i­cally update your Twit­ter theme.

 

Design con­sid­er­a­tions

Remem­ber, by default twit­ter aligns all back­ground graph­ics to the top left. So, in gen­eral the space left of the twit­ter feed out to the browser edge is what most users will see. You can put con­tent as far to the right as you want but only users with the largest mon­i­tors will ever see it. Twit­ter Back­ground Checker can show you what you’re back­ground will look like when viewed in dif­fer­ent resolutions.

Also keep in mind the Twit­ter stream changes posi­tion based on whether or not the viewer is logged into Twit­ter. So the cool graphic a user sees when they are not logged in will most likely end up cov­ered by your Twit­ter stream when they view your page after log­ging into Twitter.

 
Hal­lisar @hallisar
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Huge @hugeinc

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A few great examples

If you’re in a need of a lit­tle inspi­ra­tion essen­tially any major blogs or com­pany using Twit­ter will have a cus­tom background.

 
Car­son­i­fied @carsonified

 
Divvoted @divvoted

 

Kris Colvin @kriscolvin

 
Alek Lisef­ski @aleklisefski

 
 

We’ve shown you a few of our favorites to get you started. Now it’s your turn—have a favorite of your own you would like to show off? Share it in the com­ments below.