My final graphic design was a roller coaster of ideas all running together into one image. I had many changes and rough draft-type ideas but finally came to the result in which I am very pleased with. I tinkered with many different tools in Photoshop and found some things that I felt were interesting enough to keep in my final design. After many conflicting ideas, here is the final result:

My original Idea was to create a poster to use as the background for my website. Since my topic is gaming, I had taken many screenshots as I was playing some games to use in my poster. I began cutting out parts of the images I knew I would probably end up using.

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I cut out both the characters from Destiny 2 and the AK-47 from CSGO and began a layout of 1920 x 660 pixels for the project. I felt like since I had a female and a male character, I could contrast them by placing them on either side of the poster to make an asymmetrical first layout. I knew I’d want the AK-47 to be centered so that it fit with the asymmetrical theme and I wanted it big. I realized that if i was going to make a background for my website I should probably put some some words of welcome, so I added “Welcome” to the middle of my poster. Since I wanted to have the AK-47 centered as well, I was conflicted, until I found out about clipping. I could clip the AK to the word and it would show up inside of it! Perfect! I found this out while watching a YouTube video on cool things to do in Photoshop (15:45)! This is my first design:

I really liked how the AK clipped inside the word, but the poster was kind of bland and i wanted to stick to one topic. I ended up choosing Destiny 2 as the topic and kept with it. I went back into Destiny 2 and took some more screenshots. After some time, I threw together my design I used for my draft poster. This time I clipped the background image of the ship to “welcome” and really liked the results of how the word appeared to be blocky!

After reading the comments on my design I noted that my website header was blocking the center part of my image, so I promptly removed that. I realized now that I would have to incorporate these introductory phrases into the poster. I ended up making a black ellipse then putting the words in white over the top of it, then placing that in the blank space at the bottom of my image. I also decided to shrink the characters a little to bring more focus onto the ship in the center.

With all that completed, I felt like there was a little more depth I could add to the image. I decided to clip an adjustment layer to the “welcome” and edit that over the ship inside the letters to allow them to stand out a little more. I went with the color blue. While messing with the paint brush on the adjustment layer, I noticed that when I removed the layer from just the ship inside the letters, it made it feel more 3-Dimensional, so I left it. Thus the final result came to be.

I was able to use the images from Destiny 2 because they allow it in the Terms Of Use!