Design a Custom Twitter Header in 8 Simple Steps
Howdy! Maybe you’re one of those who haven’t updated their
Twitter headers yet, or maybe you’ve heard it already but you’re not
just into creating your own design due to a lack of inspiration? Well,
that’s not a problem at all now, this tutorial is for you. I’m going to
show you how to create your own, and showcase some Twitter headers for
your inspiration.
Before we get started creating our own design, let’s take a look at this list of inspiration to boost up your creativity level.
Use of Self Portrait
Select your best photo and align it properly to with the avatar.
Branding
Select the best product you own and showcase it.
Vector Illustration
Using Vector art is always good to look at.
Dark Backgrounds
Dark background makes the avatar picture and text pop ups more.
Creative
Very creative how they present their interest by the use of illustration.
Make it Simple
@twitter
@SocialNorth
Now that you’ve seen some inspiring Twitter Headers, let’s create
your very own Twitter header. See below how I created my own Twitter
header.
Creating The Custom Design
Step 1
Open Photoshop and create a new document 520px by 260px.
Step 2
Let’s setup a guideline where our block will end. To do this go to
View –
New Guide. Set the value to
180px and make sure you select
Horizontal.
Step 3
Now let’s create the blocks. Using the
Rectangle Tool(U) create a
11px by
11px shape, place it from the top and downwards for the guideline and make sure each block has a distance of
5px. Also adjust the positioning as shown in the screenshot below.
Step 4
Duplicate all the blocks until you reach far right.
Step 5
Now that we have all the blocks in place, time to change the colour
of each block. The goal is to suit your current twitter background. What
if we choose three colours from the existing background? I took two
colours from 1WD’s logo and a one colour a little lighter than dark
grey.
The orange squares will be aligned to the avatar image, then the remaining blocks will be filled by the other colours.
Step 6
Continue filling the boxes with colours until you fill them all. Once
you’re done, you should have something that looks like in the
screenshot below.
Step 7
It feels like it’s a bit boring that it has the same number of blocks
in each columns. What if we remove some blocks on the top and bottom?
Let’s try it.
It looks more appealing to me. What do you think?
Step 8
Twitter will automatically darken up bottom part of the image about
50% – 60%. In this case, 60% of our design will not be enough to make
the text pop up more.
How it looks when we upload it on Twitter.
Now what we are going to do is add a gradient to the bottom part of our design. Select the
Gradient Tool(G), change the Foreground colour to
#8a8c8f, set the gradient to Foreground to Transparent. Start filling from the bottom towards the centre of the canvas.
Now that we have finished our design, save it as JPEG,
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S to save for web.
How it looks when I uploaded it to Twitter.
How To Set Your Twitter Header
Click the settings icon and choose
settings from the drop down menu.
Select Design
When you scroll down to the bottom you will see
Customize your own. Click change header botton and upload the JPEG file we just created.
When you look at your profile you will see how great it is :P
Conclusion
There you have it, we just created our new custom Twitter header
design in eight simple steps. Just make sure that your Twitter header is
a part of the overall design and describes your personality or brand.
Make it as simple as possible.
Well, that’s it! I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Make sure to
share this to your friends if you like it and don’t forget to follow me
on Twitter
@zone83store. Thanks!