Kyle Goodman

About the Artist

Hello! My name is Kyle Goodman. I am a graphic designer, currently attending UMBC (Class of 2025). I’ve been pursuing the graphic arts since middle school. My dad had to move out from the house we were in and move to a condo. To compensate for losing a backyard and trampoline we had as kids, he bought a nice computer at the time. It was an “e-machines” computer from 2007. That’s when I started using the internet more and more, and eventually stumbled across forums where it was designers who would make alternate game covers for the football game franchise “Madden”. I was always interested in making my own covers for the game and would eventually download a template to start editing on a program called “Gimp 2.0”. Gimp was a limiting program when it came to achieving the proper effect I wanted in my edits. I would eventually download Photoshop within a year of me learning how to make covers. From there I would expand my horizons to other forum websites that I would get recommended to use, where I would start to make more graphics like these things called “forum signatures” where they basically customized the user experience more. That led to me learning more about graphic design and getting into designing different types of images such as desktop wallpapers that involved sports athletes, musicians, or other forms of entertainment like TV Shows, other video games, and so on. For many years I had no formal teaching, or knowledge about color theory. I would simply feel inspired by the artists who posted on this website and try to emulate some of the patterns I would see in their work. Some of the designers would even go as far as sending me their PSD files to break down and reverse engineer what they would create. Over time, I phased out of creating for those websites and would start “freelancing” for kids in high school. I started charging $5 for edits of kids on different sports teams for my school. It was very successful in terms of finding more and more clients, the problem was the amount of work I would put into the edits would not feel fair for the amount of work I was putting into them. I was getting more orders than I could work in a timely manner. This opened my eyes to more of the business side of freelance art. During this time, instagram would become the big social media that we know it as today. After graduating high school I would phase out of doing edits for my former classmates. This is where I would start making artwork to post on an alternate instagram account dedicated to just that. This page would pick up traction pretty quickly and would lead to me getting 1000 followers in just under a year. The recognition felt good, but I would feel overwhelmed to always make “art” for my followers. I would stop posting and take breaks for months, and eventually years, because it felt like my purpose of making art felt lost. This led to me going back to college. Once the pandemic started to transition back into opening things back up, I attended UMBC. Here is where I started finding my hunger for graphic arts and wanting to create. I changed my view on my art, and even harped back on the art I used to create for social media as carrying great purpose even if it didn’t feel like that at the time. I see it now as a positive representation of figures that people look up to, mostly African Americans, figures who inspire me and my art.