It’s not exaggerating to say that an profile icon or picture in social media is your account’s face in the virtual world. While you can upload any random image for profile icon, making a profile icon that’s visually appealing might work in your favor.

 

There’s a video version of this tutorial. I recommend checking it out!

Size

Social media platforms don’t usually ask for HD images for profile icons. For both height and width, 800 square pixels is usually enough, but I prefer 1000 at minimum.

 

I think it’s best to have the illustration size big enough for posting on social media. While printable size would be ideal.

Also, if you find it a pain to zoom in and out to see if your artwork looks good in smaller size

 

Have the Navigator on screen if you haven't, then resize it to around 100 square pixels instead. Now you can see the small version in real time.

Header

To be safe, it’s best to have your icon in square shape because sometimes the icon got cropped into weird shapes. Most will crop the icon in circle, so we’ll use it as reference.

 

To make the circle the easy way, go to sub tool Figure (1), then choose Ellipse (2). The Line/Fill (3) should be Create Line, the middle option.

Check the Aspect Type (4) and click specify length (5). You can choose how many pixels the circle’s diameter would be (6), which is awesome.

Since the canvas size is 1000 square pixels, type 1000 on both width and height.

 

Click the top left corner of the canvas.

A perfect circle appears.

After you made the circle, paint the outer parts in black to make it look cropped like it would on the social media.

Test it on your profile picture to see if the focal point is right in the middle of the circle. It it is, you’re good to go.

Let’s call the circle “crop template” for the rest of tutorial because we’ll be using it in later sections. I have a crop template cheat sheet you can see below. If you want to use it, just save the picture below into your device.

Color

Almost every platform has light and dark modes. It’s a good idea to test if the profile icon would look good in black, gray and white. To test, use the crop template from before and increase its brightness with Edit > Tonal Correction > Hue/Saturation/Luminosity.

This profile icon has low contrast.

Try comparing it with this one that has higher contrast.

Which one looks better in small sizes and in any color mode?

For the pictures above, the character and the background are drawn in separate layers. I just increased the background’s luminosity to make the silhouette pop.

 

When coloring, remember that high contrast make the icon easier to see. In a way, you can’t go wrong making a black and white icon. After all, the color pair with highest contrast are black and white.

But it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. If you want to use colors, it’s okay to go with the colors you want and adjust later.

Letter Based Icons

When designing a letter based profile icon, you might be happy with your design only to find out that your profile icon got crop in an awkward way when you upload it.

Use crop template from the previous section to avoid this problem.

When using alphabet and the like, all letters are best in uppercase if possible. There’s a reason why comic books use all caps for their dialogs instead of the usual first word’s first letter only, It’s easy to read.

We want letter based icon easy to read at glance in any size.

Of course, you can tweak and stylize the letters to make it easily readable in lowercase. Turning it into something like a logo. For example, you can stylize the B of “beam” to make it recognizable even if people can’t read the other three letters.

If the name you use has more than four letters, unique spelling or hard to remember, you can opt to stylize the first letter of the name. Same goes if the name contains more than one word. Clip Studio, PlayStation, General Electric—brands and organizations use this all the time.

Note: That’s really the name of someone I know in real life, his parents were being too creative naming him!

 

Stylized initials is more like a logo, you can stylize it in any way you want to make it unique and identifiable at glance, even if the initials are not easily readable.

In the case the initial is too common (ex. TV, WC, AC) or overlaps with the initials of existing brands/organizations, you might want to think of alternative.

 

For example, the initials for Wanderwort Chronicles would be WC, you can shorten it into W-Chro instead. This way people won’t think of water closet when looking at the profile icon. You can also insert the full name somewhere inside the icon.

If the word or name you want to use is long and you don’t want to use initials or shorten it, you can use it in full. But for social medias that turn your icon into a super tiny circle like YouTube, it’ll become eye-straining at best and unreadable at worst.

 

While the full name in both samples are hard to read or unreadable when resized, the one on the right is still recognizable because of the huge W-chro.

Words over picture also works. Make sure the words are readable by contrasting the word’s color and the picture.

Picture Based Icons

With pictures, you have more leeway with what you can do. Portrait, avatar, showcasing your art, promoting your projects or even treating it like a status update, anything can work.

 

Just like any other artworks, you have to know what you want to draw first. I prefer to sketch in a bigger area, then I crop the picture after I’m done with the sketch. Sometimes I keep the whole thing and crop only when uploading.

 

The canvas for this sketch is 2000*2000.

Copy the crop template size of your choice and paste it onto the canvas. See if the focal point(s) can fit inside one of the circles, preferably 800 pixels and up ones. The focal points of this picture is the face and the “birthday” part of the cake.

 

Because both fits just fine in 1500 and 1000 circles. I decided to keep the picture at its original size instead of cropping.

Hide the circle and start drawing. If you do line art, consider making it in Vector layer instead of raster. There’s a sub-tool called Correct Line (hotkey Y) that can help you edit the vector lines.

Here’s the sample of the edit results in 6 different modes.

1. Pinch vector line

2. Thicken/Scale up width. Process whole line: ON.

3. Narrow/Scale down width. Process whole line: ON.

4. Fix width. Process whole line: ON.

5. Thicken/Scale up width. Process whole line: OFF.

6. Narrow/Scale down width. Process whole line: OFF.

 

The drawing process:

Color testing.

Since there’s no problem with all three color modes, it’s done!

Tips

When your profile icon has low contrast, you can fix it in two ways. First, if the colors were drawn on separate layers, you can edit the colors manually.

 

The other way is to go to Layer > New Correction Layer and use one/more of these three features: Brightness/Contrast, Level Correction and Tone Curve.

Individually they can produce similar results, but it’s possible to mix and match their functions to get the result you want. The pictures below were edited using those features.

Please note that if your style’s trademark is low contrast colors, you can leave the profile icon as is. Less icon visibility is nothing if it means you have to compromise your style otherwise.

Outro

It’s funny that this topic popped just when I was done making my current profile icon. Some illustrations provided in this tutorial were the result of my tries, haha!

 

I hope you find this tutorial helpful. Thanks for reading and have fun drawing~

 

Note: This tutorial was edited twice. First because I found an easier method to create the circle for cropping. Second to add video link, fixing the narration and renewing/adding pictures. I put the notice just in case someone’s wondering why the tutorial is slightly different :)