Mistakes to avoid category one: Copyright

  • Copyright issues are best avoided. Don’t use anyone else’s material that is copyrighted. Just because something is on the net doesn’t mean its free for all.
  • Copyright is complex and different laws apply in different countries. I am in Australia and one copyright advantage is that images I create are automatically copyrighted. I don’t need to send them anywhere or even mark them with the special copyright symbol ©
  • Besides, images from the web will look awful when printed. As a rule of thumb, on a new big monitor,  unless the images are so large you have the scroll the browser scroll bar both up and down, to see the top & bottom, and scroll left and right.
  • Google images is not a source of free material.

Mistakes to avoid category two: Image creation mistakes

You know your image needs to be large so you just scale it up in your image editor and save that instead. The computer is only guessing at the information that isn’t there when it scrolls up. It’s creating something out of nothing. Some programs are better than others apparently.

Poor image contrast. I made this mistake with one of my promotional button/badges. It was light-blue with black text and an abstract symbol. When holding the badge at arms length I can hardly read the writing.

poor contrast

The square badge is a mistake I made after a rushed job that shows to me designing for a small object needs a different mindset than a big. The background is from a poster I made that looks great full size and not at all great when shrunk!