Mini Nameplate Project

Your challenge is to design and create a digital nameplate that creates interest and is enaging. Your nameplate can include images modified into text using GIMP. You can also add anything you feel is important to you like animals, experiences, hobbies, passions, key moments etc.

Reflect on what is important to you

What are you interested in? Who is important to you? This could be:

Family
Friends
Sport
Cultural Activities
Hobbies
etc.

Find some fonts you could use

You now need to find at least 5 fonts that are available through GIMP. You then need to then come up with some pros and cons of each, this will then let you choose a font that you will use to make your nameplate. It is best if you use a font with thick text as any images will be clearer.

Fonts.jpg from Wikimedia Commons by Ebaychatter0, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Collect some images you could use to

You are now going to collect some images you could use in your nameplate. You are going to save them to your computer in a folder or google drive labeled Year 9 Digital Technology > GIMP > Nameplate.

DO NOT PASTE THEM INTO A GOOGLE DOC! Websites don't have access to your operating system's clipboard, for security reasons so you will not be able to copy them out without a lot of work. For this reason we are going to save them in a file on your computer.

Getting images from your phone to the computer

Copyright (Images) - Getting Images legally off of google

Start making your nameplate

There are a number of ways you could now make your nameplate. Below is just one way of doing it!

For this example we are making one for a dog named Artemis who was named after the NASA missions.

The file size we are going to use is 1024px (w) x 128px (h)

Write your name using your font and resize it so that it takes up most of the area

Drag one of the images that you collected on your computer into GIMP to make a new layer with that image.

Resize the image using the Scale tool so that it is approximatly the same size as the letter. You can also move the image around by clicking on the 4 squares in the middle of the image while scaling it.

Select the letter you want to cut out. To do this you will need to select the text layer and click on the letter. It will look better if you also Feather your selection with right click Select > Feather and chose 2 pixels. You can now also check if you image is in the right place and move it if nessasary using the Move tool

Add a layer mask by right clicking on the layer with the picture and select Add Layer Mask, when asked select Black (full transparency). This will make your image disappear this is okay!

Fill in the layer mask using the Bucket tool into your selected area using white. It should now look something like this

Repeat for each of the letters!

Add in a background and other finishing touches:

Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow can create some cool effects to give an outline to your text. This is also the effect you can use to make the white text with a black outline commonly used in memes!

Exporting your image

Press File > Export. Your Gimp file should already be in your presonal drive and named appropriately.

You just need to select JPEG or PNG from the Select File Type options at bottom then export. You may have to press export again when there is a pop-up.

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