Let’s see what are main trends in Twitter background industry and learn something about creating them.

1. Repeating pattern
This technique is probably as old as internet. We just need small image and it will be repeated to fill whole background. If we will craft one special tile we can achieve endless pattern. This kind of background will fill display with every resolution.

2. Super large image
This solution provides larger area for our creativity but the drawbacks are large image size (longer loading time) and not full screen coverage on very big resolution.

3. Faded out image
My personal favourite and neatest approach. Combination of image faded out to solid colour and same colour set as Twitter background. This scales up to every monitor size.

Create your own?

There are virtually no limitations regarding designing Twitter background. Only rule to remember is that column with tweets is fixed width and regarding viewers resolution more or less of background is visible.

You can read more and find inspiration in this post about Twitter backgrounds. There is useful Photoshop template available to download.

You are more than welcome to be inspired by my own Twitter background.

— UPDATE — After launching #newtwitter central box width has changed so there is a new template.

Size matters, so if you upload a foto of yourself it is usually resized to fit left sidebar of your profile. Sidebar is 200 px width consequently we need to keep our picture equal or smaller to avoid resizing. As to the height we can create picture up to 600 px. Using whole height we can accomplish neat effect or contain some additional info about ourselves.

Above rules and tips can be applied to Facebook pages.

You can download .psd file with background prepared for developing your picture.