Greg as his Facebook page

Want to be the hit of your Halloween party? May I suggest making your costume your Facebook page? I tried this a couple years ago and won a costume competition and had so much fun. Here’s how I did it:

I started by taking a screen capture of my Facebook page. The common mistake is to simply try to enlarge that image to a wearable size, but screen resolution is too low it won’t scale without becoming all pixilated and blurry.

Instead, what I did was use that screen capture as a guide. I took it into Adobe Photoshop and replaced every box and piece of text inside the program using the vector elements and vector text (which happens automatically for the text). Generally vector, means that instead of the image being made of pixels it is made by mathematical algorithms, and so it can scale to larger sizes without losing quality.

Once I had all the elements recreated as vector images, then I did scale my image to a size that is wearable, something like 8ft by 4ft. The vector boxes and text all scaled nicely, but the images, which I hadn’t replaced, got all blurry. I then went into my iPhoto library and found high-resolution photos of myself or my friends and replaced the blurry photos.

Now I had a full-size Facebook page ready for print. You can probably find a print shop that could print one large 8ft by 4ft sheet, but I was not willing to pay that cost, so I just did the printing at home on my little inkjet printer.

The complete design ready for print

I saved my Photoshop file and opened Adobe InDesign, creating a 8ft by 4ft palette and importing my image. (I realized later I could have done all the vector replacements in InDesign instead, I hadn’t thought to do so at the time.)

Now that my image was displaying at the right size in InDesign, I could set it to print using the Tiling feature. This will divide up the large image into small tiles of the image that together form the whole, but can be printed as individual pieces that fit onto a regular 8.5×11 page. It took about 28 pieces of paper to print the full Facebook page.

I was now done on the computer and needed to find the scissors and glue. I cut off the bleed (the extraneous white margin) off on every 8.5×11 page, so that the Facebook printout was flush to the edges. Then I meticulously glued them all together onto an 8×4 ft piece of cardboard I had saved (it was previously the box for our TV).

Once all assembled, I had the full site on the board, now I just needed to make it wearable. I took the straps from an old backpack and duct-taped them to the back of the board, so I could put my arms through, I also made a waist strap from an old belt to keep it from fanning out towards the bottom. Finally, I cut out the profile image at the top leaving a window hole for my face, to see through the costume, and there you have it. I was now my Facebook page.

I hope this solution helps, please leave a comment if you give it a try.