Twitter introduced new themes recently, which should help bring a bit of variety to profile pages, but a shocking amount of people seem to stick with the default twitter page design. Or worse, modify it badly and really bodge things up. Here’s a quick guide to making a nice theme.

1. Pick a nice colour palette. Colour Lovers is great for this. I chose a monocromatic an aggressive red palette, but you’re probably better off going for some contrast. Nothing vivid mind! We don’t want to melt any eyeballs or anything. Write down the hex values or keep the page handy.
2. Make a background image. You can use a plain colour if you like, but the background is the biggest canvas for creative freedom on Twitter, so why not make the most of it. I used Stripe Generator. Just plug in your colours until it looks good. You can be bold, but try to pick a couple of colours that don’t clash together. Preview to make sure things tile nicely and download when you’re happy. I ended up with this, which suits my project nicely.
   If you lack even this basic level of artistic ability, just grab a nice image from Twitter Patterns. What do I care?
3. Now to business! Go to your Twitter settings and look under the design tab. This is much improved over the last version, but it can still be a bit clunky. Go ahead and upload your background image and save changes. Looking good? I’ll take your word for it.
   To the right you can change your design colours. Put your hex numbers from Colour Lover in here. Be sensible and make sure you can read all the text clearly. This can be trickier than you might think. The live preview is great, but make sure you check your actual profile page, as other users will see it. Do your links stand out? Can you read everything in the sidebar? Then that’s probably as good as you’re going to get. Job done.
4. Well, almost. You still need a decent avatar, but that’s a subject for when I’m less grouchy. Just one pointer: If you use Face Your Manga, you have failed.

Further reading: Learn a bit about colour theory, and experiment. Look for inspiration, and try some helpful tools.