Structured light refers to custom light fields with tailored phase, intensity or polarization. In the recent advances in the field, several classes of complex light beams with novel properties have been experimental produced, and have been successfully applied in many fields, such as Laguerre–Gaussian, elegant Gaussian beams, nondiffracting Bessel beams, accelerating light fields Airy beams. The structured light has found a wide variety of applications, such as optical manipulation, optical metrology, optical imaging, classical optical communications and quantum communications.  This feature issue will highlight research spanning all fields influenced by structured light. We encourage papers that are application based, exploring the use of structured light.