Creative Facebook Timelines

Firstly, please let me apologise if this is old hat, but I've never seen it before - it's genius!

A couple of days ago I saw an image on Pinterest of a "creative timeline"...

The image linked through to Enpundit where there were 26 more timelines by very creative people.  I started to look further and discovered that there's a whole new trend of them, and businesses, especially design businesses, are using them to enhance their facebook presence.

I wanted to try my own, but I've not got the amazing photography or Photoshop skills of a lot of the examples, so I decided to do something simple.  Also, I wanted my profile picture to still represent me while incorporating itself into the background.

This is what I came up with -

Now please bear in mind that I'm no expert in Photoshop, but this is how I did it.  I'm sure there are much more efficient ways of doing it, but this is the one that made the most sense to me.

The first thing I did was take a screengrab of my timeline page and copied and pasted it into Photoshop.  This would give me the exact pixel width to work with and, (I assumed), it would help me get all my proportions spot on.  I just started layering everything on top of the cover photo, rotating and adding shadows to make it pop. I just played around with it until I was happy. I chose a photo for my profile picture and layered it behind the 2 overlapping pictures in the position it would take up as my profile picture.

I then added some free digital scrapbooking elements that I had on my computer to make it look a bit like a pinboard.  The elements I had were 'Shabby Princess Plentiful' and I used the flowers, string bow, ribbon bow and paper.

Once I'd got it to look a bit like it looks above, I copied and pasted the cover photo to 849 by 313 pixels, just cutting off the part where my profile picture juts out from the bottom.

and then copied and pasted the 160 by 172 pixels of the profile picture.

I uploaded both the cover photo and the profile picture, but when it came to upload the latter it said that the image needed to be 180 pixels wide.  So I adjusted the dimensions accordingly, keeping the proportions the same and it worked perfectly!

I've saved the Photoshop psd so I've got all my layers intact and I'm hoping that I'll be able to update it in the future without too much fuss.

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Update - 27th September 2012

I finally set up a Facebook page for my blog and of course, I wanted to give this a try for there too. 

 

Here's how it looks all smart and tarty at the top of my page - I used the same method of layering over the screen grab as with my first one, but this time I increased the image size by 100%, so my photos are that little bit sharper and I didn't need to resize my profile picture.

Just for clarity, this is my cover photo -

and this is my profile picture -

Again, I've designed it in such a way that I can easily change elements of my background without too much difficulty.

Please be sweet and share the love. Leave a comment, like my Facebook page for regular updates or follow me on Pinterest.