This post will contain info that you might find useful when thinking about or making/buying your profile design.
Feel free to TL;DR it, but it can be useful. At least read the bolded line.
Tips for pre-made layouts:
This is a work in progress, but hopefully it will help some people when making/requesting pre-made layouts for me to code.
There are two main parts to a layout.
1. The main background
The main background stretches across the entire screen on the profile.
I try to set this up so that it looks ok on various sizes of monitors - from small laptops to huge desktops.
It is usually the simpler background, and can be a stretched or repeated image, a solid color, or some combination of those.
2. The content background/containers
This is the portion most people think about when they think of custom layouts.
It contains artwork, special panel containers/borders, buttons, stylized text, etc.
Because it contains content, it cannot be stretched, so it must have a fixed, unchanging size.
I can sometimes separate the two types of background myself from the image you provide, but not always.
If you are making/commissioning the profile, see if it can be saved in two separate parts - the main bg and the content bg.
PNGs may be your friend here if this portion of the layout has shadows or other semi-transparent aspects that will go on top of but not completely hide the main background beneath it. Good graphics programs should be able to save semi-transparent PNGs.
Other misc. things:
- If you want clickable buttons, the buttons don't have to be separate from the layout but they can.
If you want the buttons to glow, it typically works better to keep the buttons separate from the main layout.
You can give me both glow/non-glow versions, or I can add a very simple glow effect myself.
- Careful when uploading to Photobucket, as it tends to re-size hotlinked images whether you like it or not.
Other image sites may also re-size, reduce quality, or change the file-type of your image, so pay attention to the end result.
- If your images add up to more than a few MB in file-size, it's going to take some people a long time to load your profile.
This isn't a mandatory limit, just something to keep in mind.