Challenge: Design a motivational wallpaper in 20 minutes

I completed a challenge that my friend set me to design a motivational poster in 20 minutes.

Look below the wallpaper and you’ll see my process of how I made it.

I’ve uploaded both an HD resolution and a resolution that will fit your Mac better.

I first looked for reference ideas by googling “motivational laptop wallpapers”.

After getting a feel for what they looked like, I grabbed a quote I heard recently and put it into Photoshop as grey text on a white background to find the right font.

I visited Unsplash with the Nature filter turned on and found this photo by Joshua Earle.

I placed the photo under the text in Photoshop. But I thought the branding on the shoes was distracting.

So I removed the branding off the shoes.

I also modified the text by making it thinner and emphasising some words with slight bolding.

To add an emphasis to other words, I wanted to use underlining. I decided to grab a paint streak off google images.

I pasted the paint streak into Photoshop, resized it, rotated it, put a color overlay over it so it fitted into the colour palette better, and made it slightly transparent so a little bit of the background showed through.

In the final step, I put a gradient overlay on the text so it blended into the colour palette more. Even though the effect is subtle, the blending helps the text fall back into the photo more. You’ll notice the bottom right corner of the text is slightly tan and the top left corner is whiter.

I finished on the buzzer! 20 minutes start to finish.

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Bonus

Make this shoe your profile picture on your Mac.

Your login screen will have one continuous background.

Let me know what you think
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