Kickstart Your Sports Design Journey: 3 Essential Tips + Free Resources 🎨✨

Sara Silva
Aug 27, 2024
4 min read

So, you want to get into sports graphic design?

I never knew I would. To be honest with you, growing up I never thought of anything creative as a "real career." Today I am so glad that I can tell you that you can definitely make a career out of your creative skills and your passions! For those getting started, I wanted to devote an entire post to you to provide you with 3 Essential Tips that helped me to get started in 2021.

If you're interested, here's some background (if not, skip to the tips here): I taught myself how to do graphic design in 2021 when I was given the chance of taking over the Men's Basketball team page from Toccoa Falls College (where I got my college degree). Due to the need of creating content and updating our audience, I began creating graphics for our page and haven't stopped since.

Just to give you an idea, here's my progress: my very first graphic and one of my latest projects in sports graphic design.

This was the very first graphic I've ever created. Now, below, here are some of my favorite projects from my time working with the Men's Basketball team at Georgia State University last year.

So, trust me when I tell you -- these tips can really help you to grow and get out of your comfort zone. So, let's get started.

3 Essential Tips to Get You Started in Sports Graphic Design

Tip 1: Use YouTube

Like I mentioned previously on this post, I am self-taught. I never went to classes for graphic design and probably missed a lot of fundamental details because of that. However, I was able to learn so much from YouTube tutorials that are available to you for completely free. Never underestimate the power of free resources before you start paying for all these online courses. I do encourage you, however, that if you find yourself to want to learn more than what is available on YouTube, then it would make sense for you to pay for a course that can teach you more than that.

Below I'm going to list some of the YouTube channels that helped me to get started. Please note that these are project-based. So, a lot of times I was able to learn from repeating these projects or using my own turns to them because the videos would teach me Photoshop basics like selecting the image, textures, layers, etc. These are the foundation of Photoshop and I would really encourage you to learn these before trying anything else.

Tip 2: Focus on the Details

One of my favorite things to do when creating a design is to add little details about the main character of the piece. For example, if I'm making a graphic about a specific player, I like adding details in the background about where they're from or things that they like. On another hand, now that I'm working with recreation, a lot of times my "main character" is the city of Atlanta. For this reason, I like adding an overlay with the map of Atlanta to some of my graphics. Will people notice? Probably not, but I still love adding these little details that can add so much to your piece.

The graphic above is one of my favorite graphics and you can see that I added a lot of textures to make sure that we had a rich background to support our message. You can see some faint lines that are actually the different roads in ATL, which is super cute and a nice message.

Another way you can add details is through textures. TextureLabs is my favorite website to find textures for my projects. It's free and they provide a ton of size options that you can use to ensure that there's quality despite how big the art you may be making. They also offer some cool tutorials that you can use to learn how to use the textures that they offer!

Tip 3: Practice

This last tip may sound obvious but for a long time I underestimated the power of practicing. Ensure that you're taking time every day to learn something new and to invest into your craft. Follow a new tutorial online, create a piece based on an image you see or create something completely new. My biggest source of inspiration is Pinterest and I actually have my own board dedicated to sports graphics -- you should check it out here.

I update it every single day with images that keep me inspired to do my work and to complete it with excellence. I hope it inspires you too!

Bonus Tip: Share Your Work

Now that the internet is out there, everyone is able to share their love and passion online. I started my journey in 2022 when I finally felt brave enough to share my progress in graphic design to encourage other people who were just getting started. I encourage you to share your work online and to show your progress, without being fearful of feedback. I was able to get one of my jobs due to the content that I posted online because that spoke for itself more than any resume I could bring up to their office. I know it can be scary, but it's a great place to start. Even if you don't feel comfortable creating a social media profile just for that, I still encourage you to create a portfolio so you can share it with your clients or to simply see your progress over time. A few months back I made a post on Instagram to help you pick the best website for a portfolio - check it out and get started!

I hope I was able to encourage you with this post so that you can get started on your own graphic design journey. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me on social media and I'll do my best to answer it.

Sending lots of love and thank you for the support☁️✨