Nicholas Patten’s Work/Life :)

Nicholas Patten - free Twitter backgrounds - thank you Nick (@nicholaspatten)

:) Thanks.

Thanks for sharing, love the colors.

Thanks for the nice words. :)

Love the colors but i have 2 simple issue .. which are...1. it takes long time to download (almost a MB for a BG) and no 2. It will not fit almost any screen size.. thats why i wrote an article about efficient twitter background design where the image file is smaller (47KB-130KB) .. faster download and will fit any screen from 1280 - 4500pix.. basic in twitter bk design .. either use tiled images or make image that fades into right and bottom to a single color.. i am not a designer nor a graphics expert.. so i am absolutely not questioning your design.. its fantastic.. :) i'm just pointing out some other things that we need to think.. technically i will not visit a persons twitter if i see it takes too long to load their background image..

if you have time take a look
"Efficient Twitter Background image that fits most of the screen size. and Twitter BG Photoshop template Download http://j.mp/6nW6V"

Don't forget to share your ideas..

Hey Ruhani,
It is meant to be 1900 x 1440 for a reason. I have a 21' iMac and in order for my design to fill the whole browser screen it has to be that size or even larger. I do not like fading to a solid color for design purposes. Most of the backgrounds on other people's twitter pages do not fill my whole screen, so therefore that's why the images should be this size or bigger. It'd be nice if Twitter had a stretch image option to shrink or expand according to browser window size. Then the overall issue would be solved. :)

Actually we design for the web, we need to keep in mind what most people are using .. because twitter background is not for us to enjoy but give a different impression to the visitors. If you use analytics, you can actually find out most people are using 1280px resolution, very few people uses 1900px.. anyway I have laptop and a desktop with 24" lcd .. so my res on desktop is 1920.. where this background you can see the blank side..

Anyway I understood your point but I still can't agree with the file size, no matter what reason is that.. a bg file with 700+KB isn't acceptable by most of your visitors.. we need to get pass what we have .. but to look into what others have.. how they are feeling when they come to our pages

Even if twitter come up with stretch image option, it wont solve the problem.. because it will literally distort the image on different aspect of resolution such as 4:3 and 16:9 ..

Also here is a small stat what res people uses .. from Aug 2009 (WikiPedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution

1024×768 17.17% people uses
1152×864 3.06% people uses
1280×768 0.96% people uses
1280×800 8.22% people uses
1280×960 2.01% people uses
1280×1024 21.26% people uses
1366×768 1.81% people uses
1440×900 11.44% people uses
1600×1200 1.13% people uses
1680×1050 18.12% people uses
1920×1080 3.80% people uses
1920×1200 5.43% people uses
Other 2.57% people uses

For me, what i think is about people and how they will feel when they visit my twitter profile.. (fast loading always counts) .. according to the stat above 1900px not even listed as a standard res.. it's pretty much non standard.. (combined in 2.57%)

As i stated before I'm not here to hurt your feelings or question your work in any means... It is all about making it easy for our visitors..

Thanks for reading :)

:) No worries at all. I understand your points and that it's good to care about how others view your work and/or twitter background designs. But to be completely honest, I don't care if they still have their computer from the late 90's or early 2000's. Not being rude, I just am not going to be held back on what designs and what size of designs I want to create and use. It's their loss if they have to wait 5 minutes for a background to load. Fast loading times do count, but it's just a background design and it's only 768kb. Plus this can be downloaded for anyone to use as they wish, like a texture.

All the best.