Photo manipulation is one of the digital arts that merge photography and computer graphics. While photography prefers to keep photos unedited, photo manipulation aims to deliver a message or idea by merging photos and applying computer graphic effects to the artwork.

Some designers and artists confuse photo manipulation with digital painting. Unlike digital painting that paints the artwork, photo manipulation uses different resources such as photographs, 3D, and illustrations to visualize the ideas.

Frequently updated softwares, such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, help artists and designers to create photo manipulation artwork much faster and easier than before. The new tools and features are becoming more and more accurate, which helps you to create more realistic artwork.

Before you start your artwork, you need to think about the idea that you would like to visualize. The best method to do this is to draw your thoughts on a piece of paper.

Then, you can start collecting resources. For example, you can start taking photos that will be used in the photo manipulation artwork, or buy stock photos from websites, such as istockphoto.com or shutterstock.com. You can also get inspired by other artists’ artwork such as the following creative examples.

Sebastian Magnani

Paolo Cecchin

Fábio Araujo

Anton Semenov

Paolo Cecchin

Paolo Cecchin

Luigi Gattinara

Marc Tule

Glen Wexler

Henry

Ferdi Rizkiyanto

Gustavo Lopez Mañas

Ayman Anwar

Erik Herrström

Patrick Monkel

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Regardless of whether you’re a small indie designer looking for ways to improve and expand your current skill set or a small business wanting to wrap your brain around the process of creating a logo for yourself, the following tips and thoughts are designed so you can learn from other peoples’ errors and not get tangled up in them yourself.

Your time is valuable, and you don’t want to waste it designing in an incorrect manner.

Related posts:

• 20 Examples of Creative Logo Design
• Extraordinary Mono-Color Logo Examples
• Creative Examples of Negative Space Logo Designs
• Logo Design Trends for Big Companies
• How to Design a Logo of Your Initials

The following are some common logo design mistakes to watch out for.

1 – Designing Blind

What do I mean? Working without any kind (or an extremely vague) briefing from a client. I can’t stress how much of a recipe for absolute chaos this is. It’s so simple that it almost sounds stupid. Going into a project completely blind is almost certainly going to fail. You can also check Informative Details for Organizing Your Graphic Design Process.

2 – Designing with Only You in Mind

Design is of course a deeply personal form of creative expression. But it’s important to learn quickly that each product is designed for a target audience, and letting your own preferences and thoughts clouding this process can compromise the work you’re doing. It’s fair to say that sometimes the client can let their tastes influence their judgment over what would be better for the project. Learning to see from the audience’s point of view is a hard lesson but it’s better to nail it quickly.

3 – Missing What Makes a Client Unique

Every client is going to have a unique selling point (UPS). These vary greatly and are a crucial element to keep in mind when designing. Failing to locate a client’s UPS is a common logo design mistake. Keeping it in mind and then subtly molding your design around it (obviously you don’t want to ram it down people’s throats) is a sure fire way to tap into the correct design.

4 – Ignoring Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is something that reaches way beyond a logo or a brand identity; it’s deeply ingrained in the genetics of a product. In essence, it’s where a brand is perceived to sit when compared to other brands selling a similar (or the same) product. For example, Mars bars are down around the low price but not low value end of the chocolate spectrum whereas Lindt chocolates are perceived (and present themselves) as high value and fairly high price, and their marketing logos reflect this. Being aware of roughly where a client’s brand sits in comparison to others around them is integral to getting the correct tone for a logo when designing.

5. Lacking Research

Make sure you thoroughly understand every aspect of the client you’re designing for. It’s more than likely that the business that’s hired you may not fully understand the potential of a good logo design and may have omitted information that they think unnecessary. But of course, they don’t know how to differentiate, from a design standpoint, what is and isn’t needed. You don’t want to try and relay on luck when designing, you want to fully understand what makes your design good for a client. Learning everything about them is integral to this. Check Examples of Creative Logo Design

6 – Limited Application

It’s an easy trap to fall into: only designing with one surface in mind, a website or a t-shirt for example. But what if the client wants to take your logo and put it on a host of different things? You need to be conscious of this possibility and design something that can easily be applied to various different places; a perfect example is the Nike “tick” logo.

7 – Too Much Choice

This is something that will evolve from experience. It’s not always for the best to present a client with a vast array of potential designs. Ultimately, they are only going to choose one from you and instead of focusing your time and energy into one or two that are exceptionally good, you’ve spread yourself thin on a host of lesser ideas. Clients will likely ask to see several examples, but remember, it’s you who’s educating them on why your design is right for their brand, not vice versa. Check Making Sense of Clients’ Inputs.

8 – Does It Work in Its Simplest Form?

If you take away all the digital wizardry that can so easily get piled on top of a logo and you find that it’s still a good piece of work, chances are you’ve produced a strong piece of design. A weak design can be made to look stronger through the infinite possibilities of Photoshop, but in the long run this is a bad idea. You want something that stands tall in its most simple version.

9 – Giving a Good “Why”

It’s a hideous feeling when a client asks why something has been designed this way, and the only answer that springs to mind is “I thought it looked nice.” Bring your personal tastes and feelings into a logos explanation is a serious no-no; every element needs to be thought out and backed up with a strong “why.” Every single pixel in your design must have a concrete reason for being there.

Keeping all this in mind is a creative way to avoid some common logo design mistakes. However, there is no stronger or quicker learning curve than going out and actually learning from your own errors. Once you’ve personally fumbled through something in the wrong manner, there’s no way you’re going to do it again. Screwing up is a good thing, embrace it.

Graphic Mania

Automotive advertising ideas are most attractive type of commercial ads. Car advertising agencies try to attract the consumers with different concepts and ideas. Also, they try to visualize the car features through the creative concepts behind each ad. For example, the German cars such as Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen focuses on the safety factor in their cars. These concepts appear very clear in the advertising ideas below. The Land Rover focuses in their cars advertising ideas on the power of the car and its ability to move in the hard roads.

Each of the car advertising campaigns try to pinpoint what the consumers needs in the their future car. Then, the creative director starts to use this need as the initiation for their advertising campaign. Some advertising ideas try to visualize the ideas using photography, photo manipulation, 3D, and 2D.

The below examples show amazing automotive advertising ideas for different medium such as outdoor billboards, posters, and magazine ads. As a designer, exploring these ideas can help you to learn about different types of ad concepts.

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Unlike ordinary business cards that people are handing us everywhere, custom shaped business cards can attract our attention both to the created design as well as the card’s content.

The creative design can be achieved by using elements such as typeface, colors, and effects. However, these elements are framed with the rectangle shape of the business card. In custom shaped business cards, the design can extend the rectangle’s borders. This change in the card’s layout plays a great role in attracting the viewer to examine the business card and learn more about its content.

The card’s shape can take the outline of the product or represent the service. Some card’s designs simulate 3D shapes and objects. These layouts are hard to achieve because they require special cuts in the business card paper to create the final layout, but they can make a very good impression, especially when you are promoting a product at fairs or exhibitions.

One of the challenges that designers face when they think of creating custom shaped business cards is imagining the idea and turning it into a real product. The easiest way to imagine what the card will look like is to create a draft shape of it on a piece of paper and use this paper to figure out what the final card will look like. Also, you can get inspired by looking at other designs similar to the creative custom shaped business cards below.

Business Card for: Mineral Spring Water

Business Card for: Counter Creatives

Tongue Depressor Business Cards

Business Card for: Shi Shi

Sommelier Business Cards

Sandrine Abraham business card

Mixtape Generation Business Card

Milk Man business card

Corey Little business card

Business Card for: State Systems Radio

Silver Foil Stamped

Business Card for: MindWarp Entertainment

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Choosing the font for a website or design is one of the most challenging tasks for designers, and a common font that designers like to implement is the handwriting font style. Not only do they use it because it is attractive, but also because simulates the casual style of hand-written texts.

When you choose this type of fonts for your design, you should consider the font glyphs and style to be user-friendly. If the font is hard to read, it will be a weak point in the design. There are many font examples on the web that you can buy or download for free and use in your design.

In order to provide a good level of usability and readability, you might want to consider the following tips when choosing a handwriting font:

1. Do not use fonts that are too thin or too thick, but try to use a font with normal width, as thin and thick fonts can be hard to read, especially when small in size.
2. Clear glyphs – choose a font that has clear and readable letters. Hard-to-read glyphs can be a serious problem, especially with long texts.
3. Do not use handwriting font in paragraphs, the fonts are usually casual and using them in multiple line paragraphs makes it hard to read and identify the glyphs.

You can find free handwriting font examples below, and you can click on each preview image to visit the font’s download link. All the fonts below are free for personal use, and some of them are free for both commercial and personal use.

Try to download and use the fonts below and share your experience with your preferred font with us and how you find it useful in your design. You can also check these related fonts:

• 45 Useful Signature and Handwriting Fonts
• 25 Useful Handwriting Fonts for Free Download
• 10 Useful Examples of Script Fonts

Architects Daughter

Daniel

Desyrel

Draw Veticamini font

FFF Tusj font

Jenna Sue font

James Fajardo Font

Catholic BB Font

Vtks Font

Pecita Font

Scriptina Font

Cassette Font

Attack of the Cucumbers Font

Throw My Hands Up in the Air

Honey Script

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