Along with Facebook, Twitter has grown into a huge social network for a lot of people. You can find your average joe, celebs, employers, friends, co workers, family members – the list goes on! When you sign up to Twitter, you get a pretty plain background with ways to update it with standardized one Twitter offers. However, what if you could create your own? I will show you show.

There are two ways to create a Twitter background, one being a tiled background, like my twitter page, another to have some information and a picture/company logo to the left of the tweets. Whatever you decide to do, you need to make sure you find out what resolution people are using these days. After a few hours on my website, user resolution logger gave me these statistics.

Create a tiled/seamless background

Step One

Find seamless backgrounds. The backgrounds I found came from http://www.filterforge.com/.

Step Two

Once you find your background, right click it and choose copy image. I used this:

The size of this background is 512px by 512px.
You can use as many as you want, but for this example, I used this.

Step Three

Since you copied the picture from their website, just go into Photoshop, File > New, and size of the document should already be 512 by 512. Click OK.

Now hit Control – V to paste your background.

Step Four

Turn it into a pattern. In Photoshop, go to Edit > Define Pattern. Type a name and click OK.

Step Five

Create a new document that is 512px wide by 1024px high. The reason for 1024px high is because you want to double the height of the image. Doing this will make sure the image is completely seamless. Also, < 1024px high is about what the average user has for their resolution on their computer.

Now, go to Edit > Fill and choose your pattern. Then navigatie to your pattern.

(click image for full view)

Step Six

Add effects to the background.

(click image for full view)

Once you are finished with your image, save it as a .jpg.

Step Seven

Import it into your Twitter account. Login to your twitter account and then go to Settings at the top. Click on design. Then click on change background picture. Click on choose file. Finally, select your image, click the tile background check mark, and hit save changes.

You are finished with the seamless background tutorial.
Here is what my Twitter page looks like (follow me).

Create an informational twitter background

Think of this as a line card you would use in emails at work. However, now you can use graphics and get it to be much more enjoyable for the viewers. We need to look at the statistics again so here they are:

By the looks of it, more people are running on a 1280 x 800 screen resolution. We should base our background around that. However, there are a few people who use larger resolutions (I use 1920 x 1200 – 24in HP screen[w2408]). Therefore, I created a document in Photoshop in the size of 1350 x 900.

If you are going to base the tweet section around this document, then you need to find the middle of this document.

Step One

Turn Rulers on and Snap on in the View drop down. The width of the tweet section is 763px wide. Also, the height is 65px high from the top of the page, to the top of the tweet section. You want to keep that in mind when designing your background. Draw the rulers in to outline the center of your image.

(click image for full view)

Step Two

Start designing!
I will just design a basic template here and I will also provide you with a downloadable .psd in zip format.
(click images to view full size)

Here is the idea of the template. You have your top (black), your left and right (dark gray) and your middle (light gray).

Here is my design without the tweet section. As you can see, the left and right sides bleed into the middle.

Here is what it will look like with the tween section in it. Keep in mind, this is a 1350 x 900 area. If people are viewing it smaller, your information may be cut off.

Step Three

After you finished with your design, save it as a .jpg and log into your twitter account. Go to Settings at the top, click on design. Now, click on change background picture. Choose your file and make sure that file background is unchecked. Click save settings.

Download PSD

If you would like other templates for different sizes, leave a comment.
If you want me to custom design a background for you, leave a comment!

Download the template to the informational twitter background:

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