I finished grabbing soundbites for the review of our 2013 special. I then started putting together the post that will hold the embedded audio player, describe the podcast and allow for listeners to interact with each other while they listen to the show. Part of the post requires a graphic. Instead of using a generic picture or one of the sports images we have access to we usually create our own graphics. More specifically our graphics artist Ryan typically does the graphics, but not this year. With me being on an media arts internship and genuinely wanting to improve my graphic artist abilities I decided to put the podcast logo together myself. This is what came out:

The background image is a picture I shot while I was in Nashville watching one of the Astros minor league affiliates play ball. As part of my post editing I decided to see what it would look like with a filter. I can’t remember exactly which one I went with now, but I thought it gave the picture an old-time look. Like a painting you would see of people playing baseball in the early 1900s. I overlayed a black background over the picture then lowered the opacity so it could be seen through. I then added the sites logo and words. The words and overall size of the image were the areas I spent the most time figuring out. The original font looked to pixelated so I played with several different fonts before settling on Source Sans pro. I thought I pulled the right canvas size for the editor we use, but it was coming up short on the sides, so I had to adjust the canvas size a bit until I got it to fit correctly in our editor on SB Nation.

I always feel like my graphics are missing something or are too simple. This piece is no exception, but I really don’t know what else to add. I had a black bar behind the words and logo, but got feedback from Ryan that he thought it looked better with a drop shadow. Here’s what the other version I was thinking looks like.

I still don’t know which one I will use. That decision will have to wait until tomorrow.