Your Twitter account is not only a hub for you, but is for your followers as well. Take a moment now and actually go and look at your twitter page and think about what you see. If you are young, healthy then you most likely have great eyesight. Not everyone does. Think if some might even get a migraine just from viewing your profile?

The way your Twitter design is laid out is an expression of your own marketing. Although we are not all celebrities or big companies where followers come just to follow us, we have to work for it. Having a profile that is horrific is the same affect a scarecrow would have on the birds in a cornfield. We are trying attract people to us, not scare them away.

The Twitter design consists of 5 possible parts you can use to your advantage in creating that unique twitter marketing look. But before we start, let's look at a couple of good and bad sites.

The Good:


The Bad:


Now that we have that out of the way, to the naked eye some might look normal enough. But there are aspects to all of them that just kill the look and the experience all together. Think about each of these parts of them: Header; Profile Image; Background Image; Link Colors and Image/Video history. Now when you take a look back to all these examples you can see where some succeed and some fail, and even epic fail.

We will now break it down part by part on do's and don'ts of working with your twitter look and feel.

The Background

First, Read this article: http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/twitter-background-design-how-to-and-best-practices

We will start with the most important because it is the most prominent. If not done right you can just make the whole thing look ugly. For example, Google has a nice look and feel, but no matter how much they try to lighten their backdrop, it looks like crappy wallpaper in a children's hospital ward. Making it difficult to focus your eyes on the tweets.



If you do to little, then it will not be interesting. And less with a graphic that has absolutely nothing to do with you or your companies presence, will just ruin the whole thing. Like AOL.


Do it with a faded background going from left to right. Make the left different than right. Do a tiled background in a color scheme that wont burn the eyes. ABC tried and succeeded in this area.

The Header Image

First, Read this article: http://designshack.net/articles/graphics/how-to-design-the-perfect-twitter-header-image/

This is a nice touch you can add to your profile. If the background is your body, your profile image is your face then this is the your hair, and you don't want it to be messy. Go browsing around and you will find that 80% of these header images kill the text you are trying to read over them. CBS didn't get the memo about this. You can see by not reducing the balance of colors the text is just next to impossible to read clearly.
And if you want to do the collage thing, darken the image. Do a transparent overlay layer to make the color more solid. Take a page from Pepsi's book.




Profile Image:

Your profile image to be crisp, clear and eye catching. Even before looking at your actual Twitter page most people are going to see this first. So pretty much this is your first impression. There is no right or wrong to do this as it all depends on the type of personality you're trying to portray. Some tweeters use a personal picture and some use corporate logo. There are even some great cartoon drawings out there, speckyboy being one of my favorites.

Twitter is well programmed using some of the best technologies, so make sure you have a high quality crispy image and don't worry about loading times.

Link colors:

In Twitter we are restricted to the background color that we have on the actual tweets, but we can make hyperlinks any colors we want. For some reason some people seem to think that light orange goes great on white which is hardly the case.

So when picking your link colors make sure you either stick with the default or choose a darker color that will always be legible. You can keep with your color scheme just make sure you find a color in your palate that matches.

Image and Video History:

One final area that is always overlooked is the video and image history. When users visit your twitter page every image or video that you have directly shared shows up as a last six history on the left. These stand out quite a bit.

 I have yet to seen a page where anyone has taken advantage of this. You've seen it on Facebook where some have made their last pictures posted a work of marketing art so you could potentially get away with the same thing here. If there are any out there we would love to see it!

Conclusion:

If you are a big corporation, put a little effort into it. Drag your graphic designers into a board room and don't feed them until they have the perfect look for You.

However, if you are smaller and lack the talent, you could always find me @ http://www.syrupd.com and I would be more than happy to work with you to design that eye catching twitter page.