Tips, Trends and Techniques Tuesday: FB Covers

Some of us embrace change…some of us not so much. If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably realized that the powers-that-be have recently unveiled the new profile, Facebook Timeline. Switching to Timeline allows your information to be shown in a more organized fashion and gives you a certain amount of customization capabilities. The biggest thing that you can customize now is your Timeline cover photo. You have a couple of choices…you can either choose a favorite photo to display super big at the top of your profile or you can add a bit of scrappy goodness to make it your own. I like to change mine almost monthly, whenever I take new photos of the kiddos or we’re celebrating a different holiday. You, too, can create your own custom cover photos in a few easy steps!

Open up your program of choice and create a canvas that is 850 px wide by 315 px tall, 72 dpi. Select the photos and kit you’d like to use. The sky’s the limit here…this is what people are going to see when they drop in on your Facebook page. You can make it simplistic or go for the gold with lots of elements and other goodies. You could even crop out one of your favorite digi layouts to use…it’s up to you! Sometimes, I’ll even find a template that I really love and fuss with it until I get it to look right in the space I have. As you’re designing, remember to leave a small space at the bottom left hand corner for your profile photo. You can get creative with this, though, by strategically placing a little piece of word art or a small element cluster that will peek out from behind your photo. When you’re all done, save your image as a .jpeg and upload to Facebook. I typically like to take one more step before I save. I will run a “save for web” action, but I’ve also taken to flattening all the layers, copying the image and running a high pass filter (5.0 pixels, change opacity to Linear light). I do this just so I get a crisper image, but that’s my personal preference. So there you go, just a few easy steps to take and you can have your very own beautiful cover photo for your Facebook profile. Here’s the latest one that I did using Dye Job by Trixie Scraps. My profile photo will cover up a little bit of the pink egg and the bottom edge of my daughter’s photo, but that’s okay by me! I hope this little tutorial helped you work up some motivation to customize your Facebook space!