Some time ago I mentioned that favicons and avatars (or profile pictures) are important branding elements on the web. This time I’ll talk about how to create and manage your avatars.

As we participate in different social media sites, we notice that each one requires a different size of profile picture. This means that we must either manually crop our picture, or let the site resize it (which may result in cropping your picture in the wrong place or decreasing its quality or aspect ratio).

To create profile pictures for different media sites, I use a service called mypictr.com.

The process is simple:

1. Upload the picture you want to use.
2. Select a social media site from the drop down menu. A frame with the correct size will pop up on top of your picture.
3. Play with the cursor at the left hand side to reduce your picture’s size, and click and drag the frame until you’re satisfied with your picture.
4. Click on Pictr It button and wait a few seconds.
5. Once your profile picture comes up, right click on it and save it on your hard drive (you can create a folder called Profile Pictures or something like that, and name your picture using the name of the social media site somewhere in the file name).
6. Select a different social media site repeat the procedure.

Here are a few tips to take into account before creating your profile pictures:

• If you are participating in social media as an individual, try to use a picture of yourself. If you participate as a company, you can use your company logo.
• A good way to get your picture noticed is to set your face diagonally in the picture frame.
• Don’t change your profile picture too often, which can be confusing to your followers.
• Try to use the same picture in different social media sites. Most people frequent more than one service, and using the same picture in all of them will make it easier for your followers to spot you.

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