How true is this?  We need to choose our words very wisely when speaking to children; especially our own kids.  Sticks and stones break bones, but you can stifle a child with harsh words.

Got fish breath?  Then you need some Clorets!  This is such a great ad, with lots of copy space.

Get back into the plasma TV you naughty dinosaur!  This 3D Panasonic advertisement hits the nail right on the head.  The 3D is so real, it’s almost like the subjects you watch on it are invading your home.

Ever walk through an apartment building and smell everyone’s cooking mixed together?  It’s pretty nasty when too many aromas mix.  This fan company came up with a funny concept, to illustrate how well their exhaust fans work.

FedEx, Federal Express, a company that does logistics and shipping worldwide created a great ad illustrating how easy it is to ship packages to other countries.  It’s just as easy as handing a package to another person, through a window.  I love how they melded the scene together with the world map.  It’s clean, simple, and easy to understand at first glance.

Don’t drink and drive – if you do, it will feel like this.  Note the end of the road – disastrous consequences.  A greatly executed ad.

Recently we’ve read about and maybe heard the recent freeing of beagles in Spain that were being used for testing all their lives.  It’s really sad that they test cosmetics on these cute little guys.  I have two beagles myself, so I definitely feel for them.  They are the sweetest dogs.  If you find yourself in a position to rescue a beagle that needs a home, please do so.  Don’t even think about buying cosmetics from companies that practice animal testing – period!

A simple concept of clearing polution and smog with something as simple as the windshield wipers on your car.

A Faber Castell ad for true colours so well illustrates the fact that the color you’re using is so accurate, that it’s the same as the real thing.  Clever, and fun!

This is a really cool one, where a woman is actually hugging the page of a letter.  Talk about illustrating the point home about how much more thought and care goes into snail mail letters, than emails.  A great attempt by the post office to remind folks of this, in the digital age of smartphones and tablet pc’s we are living in.

Get so close and have so much control over your favorite sports, that your smartphone finger will actually have control over the games!  This is a funny one.

We all know evian water has used babies to advertise for years now – here is a funny continuation of that series.

We hope you have enjoyed these – please share this post, and be sure to bookmark us to come back regularly for more creative goodness.

Funny enough, I noticed the dunking basketball player stock photo in the montage above is in fact one of our royalty-free images!

Now don’t leave just yet… did you enjoy this post?  Then please be kind and leave a comment below!  Which of the above image manipulations are your favorites?  These posts take a lot of effort to compile, so please share this with your friends and colleagues.

I have always admired the artwork of famous artist Norman Rockwell, but for some reason, never realized that he also produced illustrations and stock art for use in advertisements and marketing materials.  Here are some vintage Norman Rockwell advertisements that feature his unique, photo-realistic illustrative style.  Rockwell’s masterpieces even made the cover of The Saturday Evening Post a number times.  Way before there was Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or even mainstream digital photography, Norman Rockwell was a true creative.

To learn a little bit more about Norman Rockwell and to see some more of his fantastic artwork, check out this other post.

Here Bob takes a simple landscape image and shows how to turns it from dull to interesting in photoshop in just around 4 minutes.  By adding highlights to some of the tree limbs and tweaking the levels, as well as adjusting the way the sky looks, the image really comes to life (as compared to the original). The techniques covered in this tutorial video include layer masking, saturation, curves adjustment layers, and sky replacement.

A simple Venn diagram created by Colin Harman (follow @colinharman on twitter) that sums it all up. It’s perfect.  This flow chart is pretty accurate when it comes to graphic design work.  It can probably even be applied closely to any other form of creative work, media production, or custom manufacturing (home decorating, hairdressing, photography, etc).  This is probably one of the best infographics I’ve ever seen relating to graphic design.  It’s one of my all time favorites!

Why is searching for stock photos such a pain in the butt!?  If a survey was held asking designers and image buyers if they find looking for stock photos frustrating, I think that at least 95 percent would agree. What are some of the reasons for that?  Well, first of all, you’re digging through a sea of millions of images, in many of the collections. Credit download and subscription based royalty free stock agencies that used to have 1 million or less are now stocked with anywhere from 10-20 million with some growing as much as 100,000 images each and every week.  That makes the selection even more bountiful, but at the same time, there’s a lot more stuff you don’t need to dig through. Quality is also an issue. You may find overly basic or even poorly edited images mixed in with an assortment of high end, professional ones.  On top of all of this, you’re usually working with some pretty tight deadlines on these marketing materials you are trying to design and finalize.

There are some stock sites that yield even more search results when you use more keywords. How frustrating! It makes so sense, at all.  Those odd ducks need to fix their algorithms.  In my  honest and humble opinion, stock agencies should always automatically optimize their search engines so that more words yield more specific results. Less images, not more. The easiest stock agencies to search on, are the ones that already implemented this simple principle in their websites. Thankfully the majority of stock agencies will yield a smaller amount of images with more specific keyword combinations, or they will at least have the option to “match all keywords” in your query.  Then it just comes down to how well the image you are looking for is keyworded.

That’s the other issue that arises: photographers and image contributors sometimes are too lazy or too sloppy with keywords, using 10-15 generic keywords and leaving out the specifics that designers need to find what they’re looking for quickly (and to weed through the sea of crap they don’t need or want).  Image quality control aren’t going to add more words on their own initiative, and they don’t always catch unrelated or spammed words.  There could be an incredible photo that you would want to use in your company website, print and hang on your wall, show your friends, or even tattoo all over your forehead; but if that image isn’t keyed properly, you’re never going to be able to even find it.  It stinks, but that’s the reality of it.  When you go to a shopping mall or department store, the nicest looking products are usually displayed at a level where they are easy to spot.  Fancily decorated end caps or attractive point of purchase (POP) displays are used.  They don’t hide their best quality items at the top of a shelf in the middle of the store that you can’t even see or reach. Some stores even create paths through the different areas forcing you to have to cut through parts of the store you might not have even intended on browsing.  Sites that include more image search results, with the more keywords you type in, seem like they’re trying to do that.  Only it’s got FAIL written all over it.  Nobody looking for an adjustable torque wrench in SEARS gives a flying crap about buying pink lingerie (maybe a small majority do, but I digress).  If I type in “golfer swinging” I don’t want to even see an image of a monkey hanging on a vine, or a guy playing the sport of frolf (frisbee golf).

Searching for stock imagery is never going to be perfect.  Some sites have much higher standards than others.  There are even sites that regularly audit their collection, removing unnecessary keywords from unrelated images.  These types of things help a bit.  Overall if you are someone who needs to search through stock for their daily or weekly assignments, it’s pretty inevitable that you’re going to have to strategize your execution of “hunting” for stock.  Hopefully you can make it less of a wild goose chase, and more of a quickly executed covert operation.  It can sometimes help to use more advanced adjectives or synonyms in your searches, in order to find different images, if using basic words isn’t cutting it.  It will also narrow down your search results tremendously.  Check out this post to learn some searching tips on finding what you need, so that you can log in,  search, find, download, and get gone; onward with your project.

Web design and some great logos:

Some of the work of the talented photographer Tom Hussey:

Miscellaneous:

This ones for my Momma (she’s a hairdresser) you gotta watch this video – click on the hairy car below

This is a short video tutorial by The Miz on how you can very easily set up a rule of thirds grid for your designs and images in Photoshop.  Composition is important in effective imagery, and this grid will definitely help you in both your design work layouts, as well as in your photo cropping in post-production.  The newer versions of Photoshop also have a “rule of thirds” grid automatically when you select the entire canvas using the crop tool.

Being a photo enthusiast since a very early age, Carlos took a course in professional photography between 1994 and 1997. Today, he works as a freelance graphic designer and photographer and is a contributor of stock imagery to several online image banks. The royalty free stock photos that he creates can be bought and downloaded by designers that use them in various marketing and advertising products, books, blogs, or editorial pieces.

Carlos Caetano is a “Pentaxian” and actually uses a Pentax K10D DSLR, several Pentax and Sigma lenses and Manfrotto tripods. When not outdoors shooting landscapes, he is at home, busy with tabletop shoots of objects in his improvised studio: the dining-room table next to a big, luminous window, and a piece of white paper or styrofoam to bounce light into the shadows. This is all he needs as studio gear, allied with his Photoshop skills.  His images can be found for sale on stock photography sites such as Shutterstock.com,  istockphoto.com,  dreamstime.com,  fotolia.com,  bigstockphoto.com,  and several others. He is available for photographic assignments, photo post-processing and manipulation.

To contact Carlos or to view more of his work, check out:
ccaetano.com
picsweep.blogspot.com
facebook.com/ccaetano

Would you like your work to be featured on the Arena Creative blog?  Whether you are a photographer or a graphic designer, if you have something creative to share we would love to feature your work!  Contact us if you are interested.

Twitter is finally getting a revamp! The updated design looks pretty cool, if you ask me.  Check out this demo video for a glance at what you will be seeing soon. The new version looks so good, I might not even have to use the Power Twitter Firefox extension anymore.  Happy tweeting – don’t forgot to follow me!

Empty LA  by Matt Logue.  Los Angeles without any cars or people…  Crazy.

PDF article by AfterCapture magazine:
http://www.rangefindermag.com/storage/articles/AC0610_Logue_Smith.pdf

And for all of you that are videographers, or love to produce stock footage and video for microstock…  enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SItFvB0Upb8

Don’t judge the B ROLL!

Here Bob show how to create a unique layout with simple square shapes in Photoshop.  Clipping group is something I had never even heard of until I watched this tutorial.  I really like how non-destructive the editing is with these methods.  Everything Bob does, he does it in ways where he can easily modify it without having to go backwards in the history tab. Overall this is a really cool effect that you can easily tweak the template to your own style or personal preference.

Adobe Photoshop video tutorial by Robert Mizerek