September 30, 2026

1 My header image is the first thing a visitor sees, so I designed it to show a bit of my personality by using my favorite color. I also chose a clear photo of me and kept everything simple because my vibe is simplicity, not chaos. As a PR and communications student working in beauty and influencer marketing, I know simple is often easier for viewers and gets the message across. The mix of the professional photo, the matching colors, and my name front and center signals a professional portfolio with a lifestyle and beauty point of view, not just a personal blog. My target audience is recruiters and PR agencies, and they usually spend only a few seconds deciding whether to keep scrolling. The header sways their opinions immediately. By making the image look polished and trendy, I'm also showing the visual and brand sense they'd expect from someone working in beauty PR.

2 When sourcing the images, I used a mix of my own photos and a creation I made as the main header. I avoided pulling images from Google, social media, or specific brands I would want to work with because I know those are copyrighted. Using them in a professional portfolio could create legal issues and undermine my credibility in a field where respecting brand and creator ownership matters.

3 I built the header in Canva since it is what I know best. This works the way Manovich describes in "Inside Photoshop": “Layers change how a designer or an illustrator thinks about images. “Instead of working on a single design, with each change immediately…affecting this image, she now works with a collection of separate elements” (11). I placed my background photo on the bottom layer, added a blurred pink color under my professional photo to make it pop, and layered my text and small graphic elements on top of the main portion of the header. I used techniques Manovich discusses, like applying filters to change brightness and color, and cropping and resizing elements without permanently changing the originals. Because everything was its own layer, I could move everything around easily and try out whatever felt like my vibe. This reflects Manovich's point that digital editing tools let us combine media in ways that would have been slow or impossible with traditional photography or collage.

4 I made my header in Canva, which shares some things with the MS Paint images Davison describes but works very differently. Like MS Paint, Canva is an accessible, browser-based tool built for everyday users rather than trained designers, and my final header, once exported as the PNG, is a bitmap: a grid of pixels. The difference is in how the image gets made. MS Paint has no layers. Drawing over something permanently replaces what was there. In Canva, every photo, graphic, and text box stays a separate object that I can move, resize, and send forward and backward in the stack without affecting anything else. Canva automatically smooths edges and text, so my header hides its pixels instead of showing them, and I aimed for a polished, editorial look that fits a fashion and PR portfolio.