Your Social Media Avatar Should Reflect Who You Are

Your social media avatar will be seen by all your friends and should give them an instant reminder of who you are. Often you will want to use a photo of yourself to help the recognition factor, but bear in mind that your avatar will often be displayed at a small size.

So, if an avatar is displayed at a small size how do I go about designing it?

Designing A Small Avatar – Start Big!

Starting big when designing something small helps you in a few ways – a scaled down image retains quality whilst a scaled up image degrades, also on many sites avatars can be viewed in their original size. If you are using a photo of yourself you make it more personal by allowing people to view it at full size :)

So let’s start with our avatar design!

Taking The Photo For Your Avatar

Personally I work on an iMac so have a nifty wee camera built in, but any digital camera will do the trick. You will want to get a photo of yourself against a relatively neutral background, this is the one I started from:

The original photo I took for my social media avatar

In the background my lovely assistant is holding up a white banner to give the neutral background.

Making Your Avatar Stick Out

This is where the fun starts! Colour the background or remove it entirely or use photoshop filters to distort your face. I will go into these methods in more detail in future posts on Design.Build.Promote. For now I will show 3 examples, including my own avatar, which have been created in this (or similar ways).

The Big Avatar Ready To Upload

After playing in Photoshop I arrived at this image:

My big avatar - original size 479 x 479 pixels

Notice that it is square, this is important for most social media sites. It is also large in dimensions but small in size – the original has a total of 112kB which is within the maximum size allowed by most sites.

3 Great Social Media Avatars

These avatars are amongst my favourites (excuse me for including my own here, but I constantly receive compliments on it):

My avatar - with a coloured background

See my avatar on twitter

lyndoman's avatar where the colour is overlayed on his photo

See lyndoman’s avatar on twitter

darylsws's avatar with the background removed entirely

See darylsws’s avatar on twitter

Doubtless you also have your favourite avatars, please do link to them in the comments!

Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against the lady, but there is something inherently wrong about anyone having over 80,000 followers before they have made a single tweet.
Her followers have just become 150,000 as I write this and she has made a grand total of 6 tweets with only one @reply – if that profile belonged to anyone else they’d rightly be called a spammer.

Of course, this has been a major coupe for her and twitter. She had the internet’s equivalent of a blockbuster by keeping the world waiting for her first tweet. A more successful twitter profile launch the world has yet to see, or do they?

Oprah’s 1st Tweet

So what did all these virtually queing celebrity stalkers get rewarded with as her first tweet?

HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY .

All in caps.

Why So Down On Oprah?

It’s nothing personal and it’s not just Oprah. The proliferation of celebrities and celebrity culture on Twitter does have a negative side to it though. Social Media is just that – social, but there is nothing social about having hundreds of thousands of followers and not interacting with them is anything but social. Broadcast media exists precisely for this purpose. That said some celebrities truly seem to “get” social media, Stephen Fry being the obvious example. He follows many of his followers back and indeed often replies to tweets sent to him. Not a trait that can be viewed on many other celebrity twitterers profiles.