Angry Birds Facebook Cover Photos

I spent a bit of time the other day thinking about how to brand the Facebook page for this site. I didn’t know what to do with it or how I should design it. I wanted it colorful and vibrant, fresh and engaging. I started with abstract gradients, lines and vectors. Hand painted characters and game logos added to the effect but but the designs never felt quite right for the page. Nothing I done covered all the 4 design principles I wanted; colorful, fresh, vibrant, engaging.

There are some guidelines provided by Facebook about what you can’t include in the photo. Your not allowed to directly advertise something, like “40% off sale!” or “buy it now!”. You can’t ask people to click ‘like’ or ‘share’ or incentivize anyone to become your fan or visit your website. You can’t offer a ‘Call to Action’ either.

How could I be engaging without being able to ask the visitor to click something, like something or give them any Call to Action whatsoever. Then it hit me – I didn’t actually have to ask the visitor for anything to engage them. I had a thought that required no text at all.

I needed to be creative enough with the Facebook Cover Photo to engage people – keep them on the page longer without incentivizing them in any way. The first additional design feature I wanted to add was the profile picture: it needed to be integrated into the image in some way. I also needed a firm grounding for a focal point to flow between both Cover Photo and Profile pic, that firm grounding eventually turned into actual ground! lol

After many ideas the winning thought process was: Profile picture to be included in the design somehow, fresh and vibrant, creative, engaging, have a personal touch and general some gaming coolness thrown in for good measure.

I took a break and played some Angry Birds. I thought it would be so cool to play a real life big scale Angry Birds and the final design was clear in my mind in seconds. My Facebook Timeline Cover Photo was gonna be me playing Angry Birds – an Angry Birds Facebook Cover Photo sounded cool to me.

I took a screenshot of one of the early levels, Photoshop’d myself into the picture pulling the slingshot and I had my final design and it looked exactly right for the page.

Angry Birds Facebook Cover Photo for the Gamingnow Timeline

Colors were fresh and vibrant, lots of pastle shades but also enough bright greens, reds and such for vibrance. It was creative enough to catch people’s eyes and flowed really well on the page, I would certainly stop for a second or two if I saw it on a page I visited.

Overall I was pretty chuffed with the final design I made and I’m looking forward to making a few more of them in the future so give me some ideas in the comments section below.

Do you have a better idea? Want me to make something for your page? Give me a shout on my Facebook Page or in the comments.