When we are not designing websites for clients throughout Michigan, we like to make room for creative side projects. These graphic design experiments give us a chance to stretch our visual muscles, play with familiar imagery, explore different styles, and create pieces that can live beyond a traditional client website.
Web design is our first love, but graphic design is a close second.
A strong website depends on many of the same instincts that shape a good graphic: composition, color, mood, balance, contrast, and the ability to make someone stop and look. Sometimes the best way to stay sharp as designers is to step away from navigation menus, contact forms, mobile layouts, and search engine strategy, and simply make something visually interesting.
This graphic design project began as a desktop wallpaper inspired by classic UFO photography, especially the strange and iconic flying saucer imagery associated with the Billy Meier UFO photos. Whether you see those images as evidence, folklore, pop culture, or pure retro weirdness, they have a distinct visual power. They feel like they belong somewhere between old science fiction, roadside mystery, and late-night conspiracy radio.
For this design, we wanted to capture that feeling.
The finished wallpaper uses a UFO image as its central subject, then pushes it into a more stylized visual direction. We adjusted the colors, applied filters, altered the contrast, and resized the artwork to work as a desktop background for our office computers. The result is simple, strange, and a little cinematic — the kind of image that feels like it could have come from a forgotten case file, an old VHS documentary, or the opening credits of a paranormal television show.
This was not a client project. It was just something fun.
But projects like this still matter to us. They let us explore mood, atmosphere, and visual storytelling in a low-pressure way. That same creative energy often finds its way back into the websites we build for Michigan businesses, nonprofits, municipalities, and organizations. A good website should be clean, useful, and easy to navigate, but it should also have a sense of identity. It should feel like it belongs to the business behind it.
That is where graphic design comes in.
From custom website graphics to social media images, feature images, logos, icons, and branded visual content, design helps tell the story of a business before a visitor reads a single word. Even a playful UFO wallpaper can be part of that larger creative practice.
So enjoy this little graphic design experiment from Traverse City Web Design: a retro-inspired UFO desktop wallpaper, created in the spirit of strange skies, classic flying saucer photos, and the kind of visual curiosity that keeps design work interesting.
Traverse City Web Design Graphic Design Project
