My exploration into graphic design started when I left college and finished my A levels. I began to explore content creation on YouTube, recording and editing videos just as a bit of fun recording my antics with friends playing videos games. Being the ambitious young person I was at the time, i wanted to try to stand out from the unfathomable amount of other videos doing the same type of content I was creating or at least surpass the category of people uploading to YouTube who put little to no effort in the editing and presentation of their video.

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So, I began exploring adding visual assets to videos and tried my hand at creating appealling thumbnails. My tool of choice at the time was a free image manipulation software called GIMP. This was far more in-depth than anything I had used previously, so I started playing around with ideas, watching through tutorials to understand the basics till I was comfortable with the basics of graphic design. My continued exploration into graphic design was really driven by my ambition to create more unique and appealing content. I would come up with an idea that I thought would look cool or be funny for "a bit" in a video, I'd then spend time teaching myself how to design said asset and then I'd learn a new skill.

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This is ultimately what drove me to want to explore this more in a more academic scene and knowing I couldn't continue just working in my part time shelve stacking job, playing games and editing YouTube videos for the next few years, It helped give me direction when looking to study at uni. 

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At university, I was finally introduced to Photoshop and began to learn some of the key techniques and skills key to graphic design and manipulation and some of the key fundamentals that allowed me to grow into the, at a bare minimum, semi competent graphic designer that I am now. Below are the projects I worked on during my 3 years at university and a brief explanation of my thought process during them. Enjoy!