Graphic Design Inspiration: “From Rags To Riches”

I’m sure that you guys have heard of many “rags to riches” stories and seen many “rags to riches” movies. These stories and movies tend to be inspirational pieces of work that start off sad and end happy. The person in the beginning is always poor, and facing many difficulties, but somehow manages to pick themselves up and they become rich/successful by the end of the story. This is what we’re going to be looking at today, but in a graphic designers perspective. This post is aimed to be both inspiration and a tutorial. Today we’re going to be looking at making something as simple as a question mark into a pretty cool t-shirt design. So let’s get started.

Step 1:

Type a simple question mark. I’m using Arial as my font.

Step 2:

Right click on the text layer and click on “duplicate layer”. After that press Ctrl+T (or Cmd+T if your on a mac) and flip the question mark to create something like what you see below.

Step 3:

Select both of the text layers by clicking on one of them, then holding shift and clicking on the other one. Then right click on them and click on “duplicate layer”. And again, press Ctrl+T (or Cmd+T if your on a mac) and flip the question marks to create something like what you see below. Also once you have achieved this effect, select all of the 4 text layers, click on “Layer” > “Rasterize” > “Type”. Then right click on the 4 selected layers and click on “merge layers”.

Step 4:

Now right click on that one image layer, and click “duplicate layer”. Using the pointer tool, move the question marks around and link them to create something like what you see below.

Step 5:

Select both of the layers, right click, and click on “duplicate layer”. And now move the 2 new question mark objects to link to the original ones. You should get something that looks like this.

Step 6:

Now keep duplicating the layers and linking them until you get something like this.

Step 7:

Now I’m going to change the colors a little. I made the question marks #5c5c5c and the dots in the center #006a8e. I also changed the background to black. It’s unnecessary because I’m planning on using this for a t-shirt design, but since the t-shirt is going to be black, it gives me a better idea of what it’s going to look like, and how good the colors look on a black background.

Step 8:

Now let’s take this image and put it on a t-shirt. You can download the template that I’m using by CLICKING HERE. I put it over the shirt, erased all the extra stuff, then just put to opacity down to 60%. Your final result should look something like this.

Additional Image:

While doing this tutorial, I got the idea to do the same with exclamation points, and this it the result that I got.

Also, dont be afraid to experiment with different font, and different patterns. You never know, it might even come out better than what we just did.

Pretty impressive, huh? And this all started from a simple question mark/exclamation point. What do you think of the final result? Would you buy it? Would you wear it in public? I know I would. ;]

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