Personalized Twitter Background: Create a Picnik Collage
Looking for something different for your twitter background? Want something that expresses you without the usual “box on the side, listing about you information”
Create a Picnik collage and upload as your background!! What could say more about you than a collage of personal photos and graphics!!?
It’s easy…start by going to picnik.com, and click “Collage”.
You will have to determine the number of squares you want in the collage. It can be a lot (so your images look smaller) or just a few (so your images look larger). In the end you are going to be tiling the image on your background so you may see images more than once. You also need to determine the spacing and proportions. You will see how many options you have! I kept mine as the default proportions and set my spacing at “0″.
I made mine as a 5×4 grid. You choose what design you like, or play around! Time to upload photos. You can use a variety…
- your family
- your home
- your animals
- food photos if you love to cook
- products you love or have reviewed
- brands with which you have a relationship
- your blog buttons
- oh, and photos of you!
Save your file to your computer, and depending on how many photos were included, and the size of your project, you may need to resize it (make it smaller) in Picnik. I would upload it first to twitter, see what you think….and if you want to go back and edit. Your project is always available in History in Picnik.
Need help uploading the object to twitter?
Login to your profile at twitter.com, click settings, design, and at the bottom, click “change background image”. Browse until you find your collage, check the “tile background” box and hit save.
Not happy? Change it around as much as you want, but sometimes new images don’t take. I find it best to make sure your image is named something different each time you change it.
I’d love if you would send me a link if you make one for your background! And be sure to tweet it to @picnik, I’m sure they will want to see too!
YOU – Make Awesome Personalized Twitter Backgrounds For FREE
You know those personalized twitter backgrounds that have the box in the corner with all the contact information in it? We are going to make one with…
Easy peasy. And you can change it easily if your info changes, for seasons, or just for fun.
Size. I have chosen to make mine 2048 x 1707 pixels because that’s what Mr.Twitterbacks said, and I have yet to figure out the perfect size. I’ve seen tutorials that are all sizes. This works for our larger monitor…worst case, someone with really wide screen will see the background cut off on the right. And that would be one wide screen!
Open up Picnik.com. I have the premium version, but you can make this with the free, just not as many options. {sorry}
Just like we did with the free advertising buttons, (good reference point) we are starting with digital scrapbook paper. I crop the page to the pixels shown above (or any size your choose)
However I am going to play around with the texture on this page with a series of effects. Under Create/Effect I applied Soften twice to smoothe out the texture,
but thought that was too blurry looking so I added Film Grain – Light.
With Tint, I played around with the color. Love how easily the background changes color!
Now for the personalization. Under Create/Stickers, I picked the Rectangle with Rounded Corners and played with the color. You have to judge the width and height in Picnik, but if you place the cursor over the background and “grab” the bg, pull it so the upper left corner is in your view, you can place the rectangle there.
Adjust the Zoom (lower right corner) to 100% and you get the view as you would see on the twitter page. Finding the right size in Picnik for the personalized area is up to you, and you can judge by looking at the twitter page. Now it’s a matter of picking the color, adding the text, and any embellishments you want. I added a series of rectangles the length of the sheet to make a colored ribbon.
Twitter backgrounds have to be 800 mb or smaller to upload. You may have to save as a .jpeg and adjust the compression quality to get it below that. If you have trouble getting a clear image, try paint.net and adjust the .jpeg settings there. If you find it hard to save your file within the 800mb allowed by twitter, I’d just make the size of the background smaller. Will be fine!!
(yes i changed the font to black…the white didn’t show up right…just a case of trial and error)
So in twitter under your settings, you can upload your design. Make sure you don’t set it to tile. When uploading to twitter, you need to adjust the other design colors too. Make the background your own! Change it for the seasons, when you take on a new website or site design or just for fun!
Want to add a photo to your background? Start the project in a program like paint.net or photoshop and add that as a layer. Work from there. Picnik is a quick way to make something cute, fun, and functional.
Hope this helps!! Have fun and leave me your twitter name so I can check it out!
YOU! – Make Your Own Cutest EVER Blog Buttons for FREE
And I don’t want to hear “but I’m not artistic..” Not an excuse. In just a few minutes you can have cute, professional, KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF blog buttons that everyone will envy and all you have to do is tell them “Oh, hai, it was easy! I made them myself!”
You need a few things.
A computer. I’m guessing you have that.
Lets start with a 125×125 button, because that’s the easiest. First decision, what color to make the background? You have several options. You can open up a free program like paint.net, gimp.org or seashore if you are a mac user.
If you want a plain colored background then create one with those dimensions and save it as a jpg, png or gif file. Don’t know the difference?
- jpeg’s are usually for photos and can’t have transparent backgrounds.
- gif’s for large solid backgrounds, and logos and anything animated.
- png’s for images with blended backgrounds or transparent backgrounds (say an image you want to add to a header) or for print ready hi-resolution material.
and if none of that made sense, you can try saving in different formats and you will quickly see the difference!
You can choose the color you want, play around with stripes, dots, etc…
Have a picture that you want to crop and use? Perfect! You might try changing the opacity (or the intensity of the image that shows) so that the font will show up clearly and POP.
But we are trying to make this easy, right? Those programs are great, and you can add your text here, layer some images… but we are going to move to Picnik to make this super easy (because you know I LOVE Picnik!)
If you digi scrapbook, you know that there are tons of scrapbook pages out there and most of them are square. This is an awesome background for your button.
Find one or several that you like on a site like DigiScrap. Open one of the papers up in picnik. It’s going to be HUGE. First you want to resize it to 125×125 pixels. (Resize, enter 125 as the numbers) Now you may need to work with the zoom, enlarged so you can see placement of text and graphics (it may look blurry, but only while in this view), but make sure you always go back to 100% to see the image in real life size.
I’ve taken this scrapbook paper with butterflies and reduced it to the 125 size. Now lets pick out text. Play with different ones. You want it to be readable at 125 size. Adjust your color and place the text where you want it.
In some cases, text is enough. If you have the premium subscription, you have some pretty awesome choices added in. You might want to keep the font simple for a 125 button because the fancier fonts may be hard to read in that small space. Save them for your header where you have lots of space!!
If you want to add a little flair, check out the stickers. Be creative! Play around with the colors so you can match it or contrast it. You could even add a pattern to your background with some of the stickers by adjusting the opacity. The one I made above is fun and whimsical. (each patch of grass is added on top of each other and varied in size)
I just added text and some fun stickers and it couldn’t be easier.
Want something a little fancier? Picnik can do that too! I’ve started with scrapbook paper again. I like that because there is some texture to it. Try some of the effects like boost, gritty, or orton-ish and see what that does to the paper. You can create a whole different feel to it, and it’s like creating a whole new palette.
I wanted to make this print all fancy. I did each word in a separate line, placing each one carefully so I could fit them in closer together. The image you see in the background is a whitish color and has a high degree of fade and is off center so it doesn’t take over the image. I could have made that the entire image’s pattern, but I wanted the design more simple.
I added the Matte effect (just a little) and in a slight pink color to the outside. Now you have an advertising button that isn’t like everyone else, and will stand out in the crowd.
And did I mention it is free?
Still time to enter my contest for the 6 month premium subscription too~!
