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For my header, I have decided to use an image of Kobe Bryant shooting the ball. I thought that using an image of Kobe would be very smart for my blog to pay tribute to his untimely death. Kobe Bryant meant so much to the basketball world and to many more, so for him to be the header for my basketball blog truly means a lot. My target audience is of course, basketball fans, so I’m sure that they will appreciate this as well. Furthermore, I didn’t want to use just any image of Kobe. After looking through many images, I found that the one I used was the best because it was a wide shot of him. The darkness of the crowd makes the focus on Kobe much more obvious, which is what the header image should highlight.

I found my source images from google images advanced search as well as Flickr. I used the same tools as the tutorial video used, which I found to be very useful. I know that I am allowed to reuse them because I checked the usage rights on both Google Images and Flickr. Both of them said that the images are free to use.

Using Pixlr, I was able to make my header and I learned a lot about creating multi-layer images. When creating my image, I had to first insert the image of Kobe Bryant shooting the ball. After this, I added multiple layers of my second image, which was a transparent image of three basketball. I did this four times to border the image with multiple basketballs. Manovich says that “the use of layers in media software to separate different element s of a visual and/or temporal composition strongly parallels the earlier practice of multitrack audio recording” (Manovich 12), which I agree with because like music, creating these types of images requires several layers.

The production process of producing my header and that of a single layer bitmap are very different, in my opinion. Creating my header was pretty simple, but the software is definitely much more complex and capable than that of a single layer bitmap. An example of a single layer bitmap that Davison describes is something like MS Paint. He describes how MS Paint is used to create memes, such as a rage comic. He says that “the portions of the Rage Comic that transition between perfectly straight horizontals or verticals and rough, irregular curves make it easy to see the jagged line quality of images produced with MS Paint” (Davison 285). This in comparison to the header I created is much more antique. The capabilities of Pixlr is much more than that of MS Paint.