Design a banner for every need

Don’t expect me to design a banner from scratch, I am not a expert in it yet. You may read this if you want to spice up a image or need to fuel up your creativity for designing good banners for every need. In this post, I will give you the steps I took to design a banner for my blog.

You will need Gimp (I am using Gimp-Portable) to manipulate images.

Step #1

Decide the size of banner you want. You can use the Crop-Resize technique over a bigger image to get a image of desired size. This step is the biggest step for newbies and unfortunately it can’t be explained in a written format. Like I wanted a banner of size 896 X 200. I took a larger image from stock images and select the portion I want to use in banner and crop it. Then after resizing and a little more of cropping I ended up with this image. Lets name it image_1.

(Click image to enlarge)

Step #2

Open the image_1 with Gimp. From the menu, choose Filters > Glass Effects > Glass Tile. After this you can set the tile width and height. When you are satisfied with the preview, click Ok to apply that effect. You will get this image. Lets name it image_2.

(Click image to enlarge)

Q: What I wanted to have?
A: I wanted to stand out from the crowd and for that I need to make one man clear in the image and others under the glass tile effect, we just used.

Step #3

To implement the need, I took the image_1 and crop the middle man out and save it. Also I cropped the ‘A’ of my logo.

Step #4

Then I opened image_2 and select File > Open as layer and browse to the man image which we have just saved. From the tools, select Move layers & selections tool () and move it exactly over the middle man. Similarly open the cropped ‘A’ as layer and resize it using Scale the layer or selection tool () to a size that we can tag the middle man with this image but keep the aspect ratio same.

Again move this image using Move layers & selections tool () to a suitable place so that background color matches with the background of the image you are going to paste else you will need some transparency. When you are done with moving the layer, save it to obtain the final image (shown below).

(Click image to enlarge)

Thats how I made my banner. If you need any kind of help, then feel free to ask in the comments and if you want to fuel up your creativity (not with just image editing) then you can subscribe to my feeds and can have a look at how creative my articles can get. Do tell me what you made for yourself out of inspiration.