For my final project for graphic design, I chose to design a soccer magazine cover. I desired to show my passion and love towards soccer as I am a huge fan of it. 
The project was a lot more enjoyable than other projects I have been doing for the past. My major goal was to bring up the excitement towards UEFA champions semi-final. The tournament is probably one of the biggest soccer event held in the world. The most challenging part of this project was finding suitable images. I had to look very carefully around google to find images that would not be pixelated when printed out, since this is a huge part of our grade. 
I realized toward the end that my photoshop skills have improved dramatically as a result of taking this class. I would probably say that this project was my favorite since I could research and produce stuff that I am obsessed with. 

These are some references I used to design the general format of my magazine cover. http://www.ashedesign.com/shop/sports/MagazineCovers/soccer.html 
http://studiostyles.net/shop/Soccer-Magazine-Cover-SKU994.html

I have filled up the bottom section- EPL/Bundesliga Top 10 transfers of the season. I did not include La Liga because I do not really watch that league. I chose some players that I think showed awesome performance even though they only recently transferred from other clubs. For now, I am done. I am ready to print this out, but i am going to take this file in case there are some areas i can fix later on.

I now am up to the stage of choosing fonts and including all the writings. Since UEFA Champions league isn't far off, I mentioned about the Europe Champion. I also gave shadow effects on the title (the name of this magazine) to highlight the title. I divided some area on the bottom to create a space for extra stuffs that are in this magazine.

I have decided that the title for this magazine is going to be 'Hattrick'. I have also included dates, and UEFA symbol to infer that the magazine consists of information mostly about the UEFA Champions league

Today, I have finalized the arrangement of all the copped images of soccer players. Then I looked for a picture for the background and I found an image of Old Trafford Stadium. I also blurred picture as most of the magazine cover. 

I decided to put the major players of the UEFA Champions league final teams- David VIlla, Raul Gonzalez, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney.

I decided to look for useful tutorials in internet. Then I decided to apply some lighting effects to the player and the ball. As i mentioned earlier, I collected few high quality images of football