How to Create a Custom Twitter Background

Creating a custom twitter background is one way to add your brand or personality to your Twitter page. If you look at mine, you’ll see I have some personal elements on there: book cover, name, contact info, etc. It’s a nice way to offer additional information to viewers than the basic Twitter info.

To set up a custom background, you can use a background that someone’s already designed and simply upload it to your site, or you can create your own. The benefit to the former is that it’s pretty much effortless. A few clicks and you’re done. The benefit of the latter is that you have more control over the look and don’t need to keep the credit for whoever created it. Let’s look at both approaches.

Using a Pre-Custom background

If you’re not that familiar with graphic design, you can browse for some Twitter backgrounds and upload one you like to your page. Google “twitter backgrounds” until you come across some sites you like. One such provider is Tweety Got Back. To automatically upload one of their themes, you just:

1. Log in to their site using your Twitter credentials
2. Search for a background you like
3. Click “Apply”

And you’re all set.

They have a ton of great designs and photographs — only you’ll still need to modify it a bit if you want to add your personal information.

Creating Your Own Custom Twitter Background

If you’re familiar with GIMP, Photoshop or some other image editing software, you can create your own background and add anything you want to it. The size will be dependent in some ways on the type of monitor you want to accommodate. But here’s the catch – you never really have that info for those who are on your page, so you just sort of need to guess. Either way, it doesn’t matter too much. Just create a nice background with the most basic information available and you’ll be set. Here’s how to do it:

• If you’re looking for a page that’s set up to accommodate fairly small monitor sizes, check out the specs here. This is good for PC laptop monitor sizes that don’t allow too much width on the left-hand size of the twitter page.
• For larger monitors, you can get a bit more creative. Use the same background size as above, but play with the size of the information you place on the left-hand side of the page. You can also add elements to the top and bottom that will still have good visibility. Here’s an example.

Again, you’ll need to be proficient with some image editing software, but maybe now’s the time to learn!