Sites such as Twitter and Facebook make it easy for everyday people to quickly get an online presence and start networking. The newest case is Twitter where practically everybody is micro-blogging.
Your profile page is like a shop window to others viewing you and people can spend hours perfecting their profile pages. Twitter, while having a nice set of clean templates built in already, also gives you the opportunity to personalize it.
There are a number of sites that has additional pre-made templates, but the fun of personalizing is giving you the choice to design your very own.
Online Designers
http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com
One of the best flash based Twitter background designers I’ve found so far. It has a limited selection of backgrounds templates, but that shouldn’t stop you from creating your own.
Supports adding shapes, images and texts and as each item is an “object”, these can be edited further to rotate and resize. It even has image filters to allow you to blend your images into your background easily.
Once the background is created, its a simple process to save the image and upload into Twitter. I love the preview feature and the ease of creating your own professional looking Twitter backgrounds.
Similar to FreeTwitterDesigner, Twitbacks allows you to choose from a wide range of pre-made backgrounds and apply your own personalization on them.
Twitbacks has a wizard type approach that asks you some questions to help fill out the profile area in the background. This is preferred by people who cannot work with a blank canvas.
The only gripe I had when playing with this site was the fact that you need to create an “account” where your backgrounds will be saved to.
Offline Designers
For the more graphically skilled in us, I would recommend Chris Spooner’s blog which has (amongst some excellent Photoshop tutorials) how to make you very own Twitter background using Adobe Photoshop.
This post also has some excellent design practices that you can follow when creating your own Twitter background.
Chris includes a PSD document that you can open in Photoshop as a starting point and offers step by step instructions on how he created his own Twitter background. As always, his tutorials are excellent and easily followed. It certainly gave me a lot of ideas on how to structure our designs so that they stand out from others.
Conclusion
I haven’t had a chance to design my Twitter page (http://www.twitter.com/newbtech) yet, but it will be on my list of things to do :) Feel free to link your twitter pages as comments so i can view your efforts!
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