The Spotted Sparrow

So, you're on Twitter and want to have your own customized background for your profile page. How do you make one? It's easier than you might think and I'm going to give you a template to make it even easier. All you need is some sort of image editing program. If you don't have one, I recommend checking out GIMP, which is free to download and use.

The first thing you need to do is decide what resolution to use as this affects how your background is displayed to viewers. I originally made my Twitter background for a 1280 x 960 resolution. I tested it out and it looked fine.


However, when I viewed the background in a 1024 x 768 resolution, the left column was cut off. You can see how important screen resolution is!


If you're making a Twitter background to help brand and market your website or online shop, take a look at your Google Analytics and see what the most common screen resolutions are (visitors --> browser capabilities --> screen resolutions). About half of computer users have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, so that is always a safe bet. I ultimately chose to go with that resolution.

To make things easy for you, I made a 1024 x 768 template from my Twitter background experiments. You can download it and use it as a guideline for making your own Twitter background. Be aware that if you put any text or graphics to the right of the black line in the header, they will be cut off by the Twitter logo.


Once you've edited the template to your liking, you need to upload it to your Twitter account. Go to your Twitter account and click on Settings in the top, left corner. Click on the Design tab and then Change background image. Make sure that the tile background box is NOT checked and upload your file.

If you're not already, come follow me on Twitter. I'd love to see what you all come up with!