Interesting Advice from Istockphoto.com

Gradients + Outlines + Highlights... Oh, My (Spotblind)


(Excerpt from an article on Istockphoto about Vector Dos and Don'ts.)

It’s easy to get carried away in the style department. You can add strokes, textures, gradients, patterns, you name it: why limit yourself to just one effect?! Well, it all comes down to consistency. Consistency is critical and the more you clutter your image with unnecessary elements, the more distracting and confused the final results will be. This is a key consideration to remember when illustrating for stock: The designer already has a message they need to convey… Your illustration will be used to support this message. Distracting and competing effects within a file can seriously detract from the usability of your illustration.

When planning your image you should start from the ground up and decide what the final look you want is: Light and delicate? Bold and strong? Shiny or matte? Comical, cute, whimsical, dramatic, serious? Once you’ve nailed the look and feel you’d like to aim for, every element you add should support the look. That’s not to say you can’t change your mind once you’ve started with a particular style. As long as you know what you’d like to convey to the viewer, chances are the end result will have a clear message and consistent look and feel.

Flowers have always been a popular subject to upload. Example 1 is pretty decent... But it could be a heck of a lot better, and with the amount of flower submissions this’d need some polish to get approved. The spirals are ragged and rushed, which doesn’t fit in with the soft gradients on the petals. The highlights are very sharp (perhaps this is a plastic flower?), and for some reason only 2 of the leaves have veins… Not very pretty veins at that, especially where they’ve cut right over the stem of the flower (on the lower right). The finished image is confused, cluttered, and not likely to attract any bees.

Example 2, on the other hand, is the kind of blossom you’d want to give that special someone. The distracting strokes from the first flower have been replaced with strong shapes that are subtly tinted to give a hint of depth and volume. The harsh gradients have been toned down and the highlights softened. We’ve removed the mismatched leaves and replaced them with 2 strong, simple leaves that are drawn in the same style. On the blossom itself some extra highlight/shadow shapes have been added to each petal, then carefully colored to look 3-dimensional… You can almost smell it.