When I think of a fun Friday night, I don’t know about you, but I think of coming up with interesting and clever ways make my facebook timeline cover photo and my profile photo interact. A few folks commented this week on the Delaware Digital timeline cover photo on facebook, so I thought I’d show you how to create your own. Whether you’re a musician/band, artist, photographer, run a small business or just an individual with way too much time on your hands, a creative facebook timeline cover photo is a great way to entertain and inspire your fans, and invoke more social interaction.

So here’s what you will need:

1. Photoshop costs upwards of $1000 so for those on a tighter budget, download GIMP. GIMP is FREE and will accomplish what you need for creating a cool timeline cover photo. Gimp can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. In a nutshell, it’s a free version of Photoshop.

Grab GIMP here for OSX or Windows: GIMP

2. Once you download and install GIMP, create two new files with the following dimensions:
Facebook cover photo: 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall
Facebook profile photo: 160 pixels wide by 160 pixels tall
Note: You will need to render the final profile photo at 180×180 and facebook will downsize to 160×160 automatically.

3. Next download this awesome free PSD Facebook Timeline Cover Photo template courtesy of Delaware Digital. Unzip and open the file in GIMP or Photoshop.
Download PSD

4. Now that you have the 3 files open on your desktop you can start your creation. Use the template provided as a guide to test how your final design will look.

5. Here are 5 of my favorite creative timeline photos to draw some inspiration from:

Now get to work!

Selly sell sell: If you REALLY want to stand out from the pack, Delaware Digital can create a unique timeline cover photo for your fan page starting at just $200. Contact us to get yours designed today.