A certain craze seems to be sweeping Facebook at the moment, made possible by the layout and features of the new-look profile. You’ve more than likely by now seen a friend’s profile and done a double take. The seemingly obscure, shoddily cropped profile picture is complimented on the right by the last five photos the person was tagged in, and upon closer inspection it is apparent that the pictures are a continuation of one original image. What this creates is a composite image in a modern style, with a mosaic feel about it. French artist Alexandre Oudin is credited with pioneering this ‘profile hacking’ trend.
If you wanted to do this yourself, there are a couple of different ways to achieve it. For Photoshop users, it’s relatively simple:
- Take a screen shot of your profile page and paste it into Photoshop
- Select the image you’d like to use for your profile and paste that over the screen shot, adjusting the size and orientation accordingly
- Increase the transparency so that you can see the underlying Facebook ‘template’
- Crop the profile picture and subsequent tagged photo frames so that you have the six images you will need to create your composite image, and then save these files
- Simply upload the profile pictures, make the large one your profile picture and then tag yourself in the other five photos in order from right to left, and hey-presto you have made your own work of Facebook art
If you don’t have Photoshop there is a slightly more time-consuming way of doing this, as detailed by Shane Richmond of The Telegraph. While you’re there you should also have a look at ’10 of the best of the new profiles’ which might give you some inspiration as to what you yourself might like to do with this feature.
But the fun doesn’t stop there – we’ve had a fair few laughs coming up with some harmless (and not so harmless!) pranks to play on friends and co-workers by using this concept of a series of individually innocuous photos, which when view together paint an entirely different picture. Stay tuned for more on that in due course.