Most people use various apps to interact with Twitter, but there are still those that visit the profile pages. Now, admittedly, Twitter doesn’t offer a lot in the way of design on a profile page, but for companies using Twitter their profile page represents their brand. Some do it well, while others aren’t quite there leading us to the good, the bad and the ugly of brands’ Twitter profiles…

Marvel – Spidey, Iron Man and it looks cool. A+

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Quicken Loans – A modern, fun design that fits in perfect with Twitter.

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Revision 3 – A clearly well-thought out design as it integrates well with the Twitter interface and looks great.

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Firefox – Looks great, easy to read and easy to use.

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M & Ms – Ms. Green dishes out the latest M&Ms news.

A Few Others
JetBlue – Not the greatest since I had no idea what the HJ meant, but its still a lot better than most.
Detroit Pistons – Not a company, but its our home town team and dang it looks so good.
MC Hammer – Please Hammer Don’t Tweet ‘Em. Ok also not a company, but we couldn’t resist plus the profile page looks good.
FastCompany – A great example of how easy it can be to brand your Twitter design. All companies listed below, give Fast Company a peek…

Companies who for some reason chose not to put in all 15-30 minutes of the time it would take to customize their Twitter page a bit more than just adding a logo. This list could be huge, here’s just a few of the names that we’re surprised chose to be so plain…

Web 2.0 – A web 2.0 company should be sharp enough to brand their involvement on another 2.0 site.
Pandora
Digg
Technorati
SixApart
LinkedIn

Consumer Brands
British Airways – Plain and only 4 tweets in 5 months?
Wine Enthusiast – Pleeeease change that profile logo.
Blackberry – Could use a new (not blurry) profile logo.

Media
Wall Street Journal – White on white, plus a pixelated logo. Come on WSJ…
The Onion -Witty enough people to do something smart with their Twitter account.
Fox News – Their Twitter profile might be the only thing that Fox tones down.

A Few Others
NASA – Just put a nice hi-res picture of outer space on there…instant improvement.
Monster – At a minimum, change the color scheme.
NPR – Same as Monster.

Note to all “bad” profiles: A plain Twitter page is much, much better than an ugly one… (see examples below)

HP – Wait…so you chose the standard HP wallpaper delivered on all of your PCs, made it smaller and then thought that would be a good background on Twitter?

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Travel Channel – A stock map tiled as the background? Off all the hi-res images available to the Travel Channel, they picked this?

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Popeye’s Chicken – First of all, I can’t believe Popeye’s is on Twitter, secondly I can’t believe that they like the way this looks.

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BBC – Not certain, but the background image looks like a screen grab from a BBC TV show. Adding insult to injury, the image is even tiled poorly.

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American Cancer Society – Great cause, bad Twitter profile. Logos all over the place and a black on blue sidebar?

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Luxor Hotel – Not the worst out there, the logo looks ok but the pic is pretty low-res and completely hidden by the updates. Also, what’s up with the random bikini girl profile logo?

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Forrester Research – That crappy looking background image might be really interesting, but we can’t see it without Right-Click, View Background so it might be time to scrap it and clean the page up.

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SouthWest Airlines – Not horrible but the background image is gigantic…as in, unless you’ve got a freakishly high resolution you never even see the Southwest plane in the bottom right corner.

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Carnival Cruises – Same problem as SouthWest, the picture is too big and speaking of the picture where’s the cruise ship? A couple walking on the beach with a sailboat in the background doesn’t exactly scream (or even whisper) cruise.

A Few Others

Zappos – They use Twitter well, but the design of the page is just weird.
Blip.tv – Weird blurry background of something.
San Diego Chargers – If their team is run anything like their Twitter account is designed then its gonna be a tough year.

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Know of any other companies that should fit in the Good, Bad and Ugly? Let us know in the comments.

Special thanks to FluentSimplicity for making finding companies using Twitter a bit easier.

Tags: design, Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Design Tips, Twitter, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.