Create Headshots, Not Mugshots

When families and friends attend a high school game, they love watching their athlete’s headshot pop up on the display. It’s the student-athlete’s 10 seconds of fame, where all eyes are on them, so you’ll want to make these personal and fun.

We sat down with our supervisor of our Creative Services’ digital artists, Scott Larsen, to get a few pointers.

ALL ABOUT THE LAYERS

If you use Photoshop as your primary software, look into setting up different layers for the text, photo, foreground and background graphic.

You’ll want to keep your text layers editable so they can easily be changed to different student-athlete names while keeping the same position, font and size as the previous ones you’ve created.

The best way to get started is to use the longest athlete’s name first so you can make sure everything fits the first time instead of backtracking to fix font sizes or position.

Some programs like After Effects have the ability to automate the process where a master template is created and then you use a spreadsheet to generate custom parts for each.

PERSONALIZE

Remember, this is a time for both your student-athletes and those students behind the scenes to shine! Let your students get creative with these headshots using photos, fun backgrounds and even the student’s name in their actual handwriting instead of a default font when their headshot pops up.

To see a step-by-step video to get started, click here. Creating headshots is similar to creating a sports wallpaper. It’s a time to get creative – have fun with it!