I first saw this done on one of my “cool” friends facebook profiles.

HERE IS THE .PSD TEMPLATE FOR MAKING YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE MORE CREATIVE

I have since seen it on a lot of other peoples facebook profiles and wondered how they did it or what inspired them to do it.

History:

From the research I did while trying to find the origin of this facebook fad, I found that the first person known to have done it was a French artist Alexandre Oudin who uses the rectangular profile pic and row of five recently tagged photos in to order to create one unified effect across the new Facebook profile page layout. He worked with the new layout to make a picture of his eyes and face spill across the page.

This post is focused on:

How to customize your newly revamped Facebook profile page

If you like to make your Facebook profile page something similar as shown above and examples in this example that shows many different people who have used this method.

I wanted to make a template for people who are familiar with photoshop to be able to drop a photo in and be able to just export the photos to the right size.

HERE IS THE .PSD TEMPLATE FOR MAKING YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE MORE CREATIVE

(This will only work right if you have 3 rows of “bio” info under your name… I am working on a new template that will work for no bio info, 1 line, and 2 line)

The good thing about using Photoshop is you have complete control over your facbook photos. If you use an online tool (like the ones shown below) you will not have as much control over what your photo will look like. If you don’t know Photoshop though, just skip down to where I show the links to other tools to accomplish the same effect

Steps to use this template:
1.  Open the .PSD
2.  Open the photo you want to use and copy and paste it into the .PSD
3. Scale it to the right size by hitting “command t” or go to –>Edit–>Transform –>Free transform (make sure to hold “shift” while dragging the corners of the bounding box as to not distort the image horizontally or vertically)
4. Right click on the layer in the layers pallate and set it to be a clipping mask (make sure that your layer is above the layer “MASK”)

3.  Select the Move tool by hitting “v” on your keyboard or selecting it from the tool bar.
4. Click and drag it to where you want it / where it will look good.

5.  Hit “command shift option S” for Save for web (mac) or go to –>File–>Save for web & Devices

6.  Set it to save as .jpg medium and click save.
7.  make sure that it is set to only export user slices like the picture below:

8.  Upload the files to facebook and tag the photos in order of their filenames.

You can also make a video of yourself talking and post it on youtube and then post it on facebook and make something like this!

Here are a few other tools for making your facebook profile more creative that emerged from this phenomenon:

• http://www.picturize.me/ (same tool as Piccut)
• http://apps.facebook.com/ProfilePhotosBar (a Facebook app that does this automatically for you without having to upload pictures manually)
• Here is another one callled Banner Profile, its made in flash and is pretty easy to use http://apps.facebook.com/BannerProfile

FOR THOSE THAT KNOW PHOTOSHOP DOWNLOAD THIS PREMADE .PSD

OR if you want to start from scratch and do it yourself follow these steps:

1) Take a screenshot of your new Facebook profile page.
2) Create a new Photoshop doc of your current screen size.
3) Grab the Slice tool (same family as the Crop tool) and select around the pictures.
4) With the Marquee tool, select around the sliced areas.
5) Bring the image that you want on Facebook into Photoshop and position it roughly the way you want it.
6) Drag the image layer under the Facebook layer and refine your positioning.
7) Go to “File,” select “Save for web and devices,” select all your document area, click “Jpeg, set the quality to 100% and save. Under slices select “All user slices.”
8) Upload your pictures to Facebook and tag them from last to first. When you get to the first picture click “Make this my profile picture.”

NOTICE, THIS ONLY WORKS ON A REGULAR FACEBOOK PAGE, FOR SOME REASON FACEBOOK CHOOSE TO MAKE THE NEW FACEBOOK PHOTO BAR LAYOUT FOR PAGES, IE FOR BUSINESSES AND ORGANIZATIONS SHOW UP RANDOMLY! I REPEAT THIS WILL NOT WORK FOR NON REGULAR FACEBOOK PAGES.