Tarrah Tyler

Making use of his design talent, Tyler uses Photoshop for this design, which is the program that he is most comfortable with. He started a design for the “Make it Happen Esports Team” that was commissioned to him. “I do quite a bit of commission, I have about 1-3 commissions every week from someone. Not a lot, but I’m working on expanding commission request.”

Combining graphic design with his hobby of playing Rocket League, sophomore Devin Tyler has made video game graphic designing into a job. Tyler can make multiple styles of graphic design, including logos, player cards and videos. 

Rocket League is a soccer video game, with the characters replaced by futuristic cars. Tyler communicates with his Rocket League community over a Discord server, where he spends most of his time making graphic art for them. These graphics can take anywhere from two to four hours, to days or weeks.

“[Graphic design is] a lot of fun to do. Sometimes it can take a while to do when I have to edit a logo for someone, but overall it is an enjoyable process, even though it can be hard to do,” Tyler said. “I like the hard process that comes with it. Sometimes I have to make crazy materials that look good in a render or fix a photo. [It] could take days or weeks to get to a final project that I am happy with. I try to make it look the best I can to make a better chance of the person requesting it to ask me to make another logo.”

Tyler’s interest in graphic design sprouted from his grandparents’ business, Progressive Balloons and Gifts, in which they have hired graphic designers to design plushies and stuffed animals. Tyler became interested when he saw the design team.

“I just figured the whole process looked very cool and interesting; they would make a design in 2D and turn that into 3D afterward. I figured the process looked simple enough and I tried it,” Tyler said, “When I started doing graphic design, I quickly found out that I was terrible at it. I wasn’t a big fan of what I was making, and I wasn’t showing my family because I wasn’t proud of it. Now I’m closer to being able to say I’m proud of my work and that will only get better through work. The first six months, the graphic design started as a hobby, and I wasn’t sure if I should pursue a career in it. I started showing my family members my work and my grandparents thought it was good for me to have at least interest in graphic design.”

After a year of practicing, Tyler began making money from his passion. Tyler started making graphic designs by request and has created roughly 300 graphic designs, receiving three to five design requests per client. Tyler is currently taking requests from students around the school. 

“I am very willing to get graphic design requests, really any type of graphic design art. I enjoy creating design art for other people just because they can see my passion and how much time I would take to do what I love doing, and make some profit from it,” Tyler said. 

Tyler does more with his abilities than Rocket League designs, he also makes custom jerseys, Twitch banners, Twitter banners, and in-game modifications using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and a 3D modeling program called Blender for his graphic designs. Tyler also uses a drawing tablet, Huion H610 Pro V2, that he paid for to make graphics, which streamlined his graphic design process.

“Doing [designs] with a mouse is shaky and doesn’t allow as much flexibility that you can do with your hands, it’s like a pen and paper. The tablet is smooth too, so drawing on it just feels natural,” Tyler said.

Tyler’s graphic design work with different programs has led him to another hobby in 3D design, which is making a wide variety of 3D models, iconic characters, video game characters, films and YouTube videos.

“I’ve gone into things like photo editing, mash-ups of pictures, changing the backgrounds to make them look cool as well,” Tyler said. “I think I would like to stick around 3D animation in the future, or graphic design as well because it allows for animation and its objects in a 3D space. I can spread my mind out more in the animation.”

Tyler hopes to do graphic design for design studios like Pixar or Disney animation, and use what he has learned so far to guide him to his full potential. 

“I’ve learned that things can start out looking bad but through a tough work ethic, eventually what I’m working for will come out right and be worth it. I encourage people to never give up because no matter what they do, there will be trial and error their first few times. Keep going, and they’ll meet their goal,” Tyler said.