Download the Facebook Page Timeline – Cover Image and Profile Picture Template Kit PSD

Unfortunately, Facebook has some strange limitations should you wish to customise your Cover image and Profile Picture with pixel precision. For example, although the Cover image is 815px (width) x 315px (height), uploading a Cover image of that exact size causes a strange zoom and crop, causing a low-res, pixellated result. Additionally, although new Profile Pictures are 125px squares, you can’t upload anything less than 180px square files!

I thus made the Facebook Page Timeline – Cover Image and Profile Picture Template Kit PSD (click here to download now)! This PSD makes it a three stage process to get a beautifully constructed Cover image and Profile Picture for your brand page. 1) Design 2) Save Profile Picture 3) Save Cover image. The PSD is annotated, grouped and layered and is thus a cinch to use. It’s how I developed my own Typographic Facebook design, as below!

I hope you enjoy using the kit, and feel free to give me any feedback to make it easier for you to design and implement your Page’s spanking new Cover image and Profile Picture!

Notes:
1. In order to adhere to Facebook’s upload limitations, the template is upscaled by 144%. Once you save and upload your Cover image and Profile Picture, these automatically scale proportionately in Facebook.

2. When clicked, Cover images display the full image uploaded, regardless of the (cropped proportion of the) Cover image displayed on your Page’s Timeline. The PSD includes recommendations as to how to deal with the ‘dead space’ which will be visible if and when people view your Cover photos album.

3. Remember that all images uploaded to Facebook can be captioned and tagged by location, person or page. Often Profile Pictures and Cover images are neglected in this way, but consider using tags to link viewers to your website, or explain more about your business!

Enter Biophilia, her most elemental and spatial work to date. Brazen in its complete neglect of structured pop, especially as evidenced by the cookiecutter ToP FoRtY divas of late, Björk’s Biophilia is best consumed as a body of work, with songs that are intrinsically linked. Album opener Moon is a sweet and spooky piece, and is the perfect counterpoint to the pulsing and intense Thunderbolt which follows. Crystalline, the album’s most pointed Björkism and first single from the album, is educational, cool and catchy all at once – and the ending is as joyful as it is surprising.

Biophilia takes a six-song tempo downturn from Cosmogony through to Sacrifice, and the results are mixed. Released singles Cosmogony and Virus are stellar ballads, being both lyrically and melodically rich. Hollow is an incredibly strange suspense piece, with a tempo that ebbs and flows like an organism struggling – and thankfully succeeding – to live. Dark Matter is most certainly a “low point”; while it sounds like the space phenomena it describes, the song seemingly exists just to reference it. Mutual Core is definitely the highlight with its huge rhythms and soundscapes; it will also appease her fans of Homogenic, which is still seen as her best work by many.

Björk is back in a big way with Biophilia, not only with her signature attention to detail, but also her branching out to the world of touchscreen Apps (I was well pleased that the album holds up without the complement of the wildly imaginative iPhone and iPad interactive experience). Some may be confused by Biophilia, some may choose to zone out during songs which admittedly are challenging. But for those willing to take a space trip, Björk invites you to explore and re-explore her world. You may just end up being transported somewhere you didn’t expect.

8.5/10

Best Song: Mutual Core

Standout Lyric: “Like a flame seeking explosives, as gunpowder needs a war, I feast inside you – my host is you” (Virus)

If you’d like more information on how Typographic’s eDMs can work for you, click here or contact us today.

Typographic was involved with the whole creative process, including national advertising rolled out across a wide range of media including email, direct mail, point of sale and social media.

If you’d like to kickstart your social media presence, call today to chat about the possibilities on 0421 785 798.

1. Stock (printed material): In any printed work, often times it is the printed content that is most considered and the material on which it is printed that is most neglected. Whilst this is quite normal (especially considering non-designer clients generally don’t know the scope of options), spending more time considering printed materials can lead to a dramatically different final result – and much happier clients. Stock is basically the umbrella term for the scope of thicknesses (measured in GSM), finishes (to be discussed in a later DJOTD), natural textures and colours.

Ask your printer about their stock options, or speak to a dedicated stock supplier – think about the obvious benefits of researching & selecting a shmick stock that presents your client’s content in an interesting, niche or high-end manner.

2. Stock (generic imagery): Often times in commercial work (especially corporate), clients request very specific types of images to be used in a design. For example: two middle-aged businessmen shaking hands in a boardroom. Whilst original photography is a possible solution in order to obtain such imagery, often times the quickest – and cheapest – option is to buy stock imagery. Often designers consider the use of stock imagery as lazy and unoriginal. While this is understandable in the sense that stock images are by definition generic, often timesthey are used as just one piece of the pie, contributing to a much more complex design – and as such, their use should definitely be considered for any given task where time and costs are of primary concern. Websites selling stock images are prevalent and offer images of all sorts of specific objects, people, places and situations. Most are easily searchable by keywords and file requirements. Whilst there are a few free stock websites (http://sxc.hu and http://freestockphotography.com.au come to mind), often it’s the paid options which will offer the better quality images. Try http://istockphoto.com or http://gettyimages.com.

Any further questions or comments on stock? Let me know in the comments below!

Teaming with entrepreneur Mat Beeche and a team of young and dedicated creatives and writers, Shoe String Launch is a fresh face on the business magazine scene. With modern styling, easy to read type and a café friendly A5 size, Shoe String Launch is a great read. My design inspiration was a combination of Dynamic Business magazine and GRAZIA.

I’ll be sure to post details of distribution points as soon as I know where they are.

Please check out more details on SSL and the first issue competition to win a Typographic website by going to www.typographic.com.au/ssl.

Love Luke

When raw, almonds have a subtle nutty flavour and are fun to chew. A nice pack of almonds costs $6-$12 from your local supermarket and will easily allow you grazing between your bigger work meals for a week or two.

Here are some tidbits from Wikipedia about my new favourite snackathon:

- The fruit of the almond is not a true nut, but a drupe, consisting of an outer hull and a hard shell with the seed (“nut”) inside. Shelling almonds refers to removing the shell to reveal the seed.
- The almond is a native to the Mediterranean climate region of the Middle East.
- In Morocco, almonds in the form of almond paste are the main ingredient in several desserts. Whole fried almonds are also used in sweet tajines. A drink made from almonds mixed with milk is served in important ceremonies such as weddings and can also be ordered in some cafes.
- Almonds are a rich source of vitamin E, containing 24 mg per 100g. They are also rich in dietary fiber, B vitamins, essential minerals and monounsaturated fat (see nutrient table), one of the two “good” fats which potentially may lower LDL cholesterol.

Snack Rating: 8/10
Pros: Full of good fat, crunchy, reasonably priced over time
Cons: Full of fat, not as yummy as chocolate

A beautiful slab of curved, coloured polycarbonate plastic with a Gorilla Glass display. Using Meego (a Linux/Intel collab) as the OS, Nokia is shunning it’s own gameplan by introducing a truly exciting UI and fantastic industrial design sans Windows Phone 7. Some say that the lack of a pre-existant Meego ‘ecosystem’ will stunt the success of this otherwise critically acclaimed phone, but in a time when technology is so disposable – and when stock smartphones are loaded with highly functional first-party applications – Nokia has a great opportunity to snatch back some market share, and more importantly street cred, with the N9.

When making a printed design where colour (anything but C0 M0 Y0 K0) goes right to the edges of your canvas, you generally need to add bleed. Bleed is an extra border around the perimeter of the canvas/artboard/page, which is added to ensure that when your design is printed, any small shift by the printer or paper will not result in blank areas on the final output. The background which you want to go right to the edge must thus extend beyond the canvas size in every direction to fill the bleed area.

Bleed cannot be added automatically with Photoshop, but is a cinch in Illustrator and InDesign where the File > New… dialog box contains options for adding bleed, which becomes clearly distinguishable as a red border that sits beyond the artboard/page when you start working on your design.

Any further questions or comments on bleed? Let me know in the comments below!

Love Luke

With a great range of colours and pretty decent sound, the Tantos are lightweight and a vast improvement on stock earbuds you’d get with an iPod. I got the canary yellow pair (Typographic-style), but I’ll let you pick whichever colour you like :0). Check out http://www.urbanears.com/#/headphones/tanto/tanto-canary.

Love Luke