Ben Gray of OpenSwitch recently released an amazing free Wordpress theme called Unsleepable. It’s unbelievably gorgeous and yet so simple. My favorite wordpress theme was K2 until now, but I am switching over to Unsleepable - it is built upon K2 after all.

Unsleepable uses a graphic for its blog header, and you can find a tutorial (by Ben himself) on how to create the graphic using Photoshop.

Hey! I can’t afford Photoshop. (And neither can any of my friends!). I have always done using GIMP whatever I had to do using Photoshop. So, I tried, and I hope you can see my title graphic on the top of this page. It wasn’t rather straightforward getting it done in GIMP - so I thought I’ll write a tutorial. I assume you have basic knowledge of GIMP. I used GIMP 2.2, but it shouldn’t really matter if you have an older version.

Step 1: Open GIMP and create a new image. The size doesn’t matter, as long it is big enough for your text to fit. By default, GIMP creates a white background.

Step 2: Change the foreground color to #333333. Fill the background with the foreground color (Ctrl+,).

Step 3: Create the text. As far as I know, there is no way in GIMP to select a part of text and change it to a different color. If you want multiple colors, create multiple layers of text and align them together. You may want to use a few Guides.

Step 4: Select “Flatten Image” from the Image menu. Then, select “Autocrop Image”, again from the Image menu. By now, you would have something like in the image below.

Step 5: Select Layer » Transparency » Add Alpha Channel. Nothing will happen, don’t panic. Select Select (as in the Select menu item) » By Color and click anywhere on the background (anywhere except on your text). You should see something like this:

Step 6: Select Edit » Clear (Ctrl+K). Save the image as a GIF file (title.gif) and upload it to the right place (wp-content/themes/unsleepable/images) on your server, cross your fingers, and hit the refresh button on the browser window displaying your blog.