The Making of My Profile Picture (As a Logo)

Intended Audience: Steemit users who want a logo as their profile picture
Last Update: 2017-08-08
Utility: Working Solution

I found it surprisingly complicated to use a logo as my profile picture. Here is the procedure that worked for me:

Creating the Logo

Creating the actual logo was easy with this cool website: https://logomakr.com/
I used the free download option 2 to save the logo in PNG format to my computer.

Increasing the Canvas Size

Unfortunately Steemit would cut off the borders of my logo. To work around this I increased the canvas size of the logo picture. The canvas is the surface on which a picture is painted. My goal was to increase the canvas while leaving the picture at its original size, so I would get an empty border around my logo. Then Steemit could cut off the empty border and my logo would still be visible in its entirety.

The program I used to edit the image was GIMP. I like it because it is free and available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

1. Open the image file (the PNG downloaded from Logomakr) in GIMP.
2. Open the dialog for adjusting the canvas size:
   
3. Link the chain so that width and heigth change together:
   
4. Increase the width by about 230 pixels (height gets adjusted automatically because you have linked both values in the previous step):
   
5. Save the modifications by overwriting the original PNG image file:
   

Publishing the Logo on the Web

While you can easily upload and embed pictures in a Steemit story it seems that currently the profile picture must be stored somewhere else and be accessible through a web link (an URL).

So I made a free imgur account and uploaded my logo.
A simple click on the image in imgur opens the following dialog that lets you copy the web link required for Steemit (you want the "Direct Link"):

Referencing the Logo in Steemit

In Steemit you click on your (possibly still empty) profile picture:

This reveals the menu where you can choose "Settings":

Finally you insert the web link to your logo on imgur as the "PROFILE PICTURE URL" and then click the UPDATE button below:

P.S: English is not my native tongue and I appreciate your feedback if you spot mistakes. But please don't point out differences between UK and USA English, it is not worth the trouble.