pick a style!
pick a style!
Clip Art is premade art packaged in bundles and sold for use in marketing and presentations - and whatever else you might need graphics for!
You're probably most familiar with the clip art era from the boom of 90s-00s internet publishing, when clip art was sold in the form of big CD collections as well as included with word processing, graphic design, and illustration software.Before computers had massive storage capacity and everything was already online somewhere, people still often found themselves in situations where they needed or wanted an image and didn't want to or couldn't make one themselves. (Remember, you couldn't always just Google "man giving a thumbs up" and be instantly provided with millions of pictures of men giving a thumbs up!)
For websites in particular, there's all kinds of visual elements that are fun to make look nice. Backgrounds, frames, buttons, borders, headers, bullet points... and, of course, you want to have fun with fonts, too!
But if you aren't a graphic designer or illustrator, where can you get some nice pics to put on your web site...? A floppy disk or CD!
In the late 00s and 2010s, clip art largely fell out of use for a few different reasons. Aesthetic preferences changed; cheap artistic labor became more and more accessible thanks to the increasing common use of computers and graphics tablets; stock photography subscription bundles are more convenient than a huge box full of CDs. In the 2020s, however, template services for graphic design and web design are coming back into fashion in a big way, and clip art is making a bit of a comeback! Canva has a collection of clip art suited to modern design sensibilities for users to use in their work.
The dominance of digital-only media over physical media and the ephemerality of subscription-based access means that modern clip art lives a rather precarious life! Try to figure out how to extract and archive it if you come across it (and feel like it); who knows when it'll vanish!
Sometimes diving into history can help us with the stylistic ideas, don't you agree? Let's take a small trip to the past...
Where it all began? The clip art as we know it goes back all the way to the Victorian era, when magazines took off and printed media became our go-to way for obtaining information.
The black and white lineart assets like ornaments or illustration were a common way to spice up text or advertisements with images. Those were released specifically as art for the commercial use, often in the form of subscription based booklets and separated into categories. You could cut it out and 'clip' into your text, basically. Here you can see more examples of this style.
But where the clip art as we know it in its digital form begin?
Back when the home computers were still learning how to crawl, on the IBM machines we already had programs similar to the current PowerPoint.
...Without internet, or the build in image libraries. Can you imagine?
The first libraries of the images for such use were released on separate floppy disks. Those were professionally drawn images, to be used mostly in business presentations. And it was hard to even find a way to modify them properly until Apple released MacPaint, which came with its own disk! McPic! contained about 130 pictures arranged in different categories. Due to obvious limitations of that era, this clip art would only use two colors, with dithering simulating the greyscale. Kinda like pixel art for you tu use!
See some examples of clip art of that era here or here!
Do you know some of these already came in 3d? Revolutionary!
The process of manually pasting the black and white lineart clip art of old times was being replaced more and more by the digital desktop publishing. The home computer industry was growing fast, and soon colorful screens started entered the scene. The libraries full of images kept being released on the floppy disks and CDs, until a revolution in 1996 came. Microsoft Word 6.0 - a program we likely associate with clip art the most today - came in with a build in library of whole 82 clip art images to use for anyone in combination with text.
This is the age we can associate with limited but bright colors and thick lineart. You can find some of the classic MS Word clip art here!
This was a revolutionary time of internet era, with personal pages growing in amount, and so the graphics available for them followed, with libraries moving to online pages instead of CD disks slowly, but gradually. With big amount of hobbyist websites, people would often share clip art and other images centered around a specific topic they liked for other people to use on their webpages. This page about belly dancing is what it might have looked like - very specific subject and thousands of pictures available! Some people would edit the well-known and available clip art like such and some people would pass it around from the CD bundles - you can see example 1 and example 2 using the same welcome gif.
With the millions of images available online, clip art became more obsolete. While it disappeared from Microsoft Word and was replaced by bing image search, "classic" styled clip art is still widely available online for people to use. Examples include Clip Art Library, Open Clipart, as well as numerous archives and blogs related to conversation of old media, as you could already see along the way.
The tradition of clip art is also reflected in a more modern approach in websites like Canva or Freepik. They offer people a more sleek and minimalist look to the graphics they can use.
Among the usual clip art libraries, the already known generic stock image websites for people to use and buy images from, people now have the controversial AI art tools to make free images to use in whatever shape they want. But that's the story for another time...
Reason one: because that's what it's for!
Clip art is art created for the specific intended purpose of being used, reused, posted, reposted, edited, inserted, and spread around willy-nilly without regard for credit or context. It's not personal work, nor are the images things that have individual licenses; they're commercial art distributed in bulk.
Not everyone cares a whole lot about copyright/credit; it is debatable how much it "matters", especially in the context of a personal non-commercial website where money isn't a factor. But if that's something that matters to you: consider clip art!
Sidebar: This is only mostly true. Because the rise of the internet was also a rise in people posting their artwork online, there are plenty of clipart collections that were just compilations of things downloaded from the internet and then sold. Some are also scans of artbooks or other collections of non-clipart art. People have always unscrupulously redistributed artwork without permission!
Reason two: The Aesthetic(tm).
If you are interested in the look and feel of 90s-00s Geocities sites, as I know many of you are, clip art CDs are where many of those sites got their web graphics from. You might as well go straight to the source, right?
Complete web graphics sets can be difficult to cobble together just using Gifcities or archived sites, but they're (usually) very easy to browse on the CDs they originally came from.
It should; it's on Melon's front page! You might not have seen its cousins, though!
Reunited at last!
Reason three: (Almost) Every Other Aesthetic Also.
Perhaps you're skeptical of the usefulness of clipart to you, because you're not into the nostalgiacore Geocities type of stuff - but there are a lot of different styles of clip art available in even just one clip art package! While it is of course still limited by the aesthetic trends and norms of the time in which it was produced, clip art is remarkably versatile! I wouldn't go so far as to say there's something for everyone, but there's something for a lot of people.
To try and demonstrate this, everything in this zine entry came from a clip art CD! The fonts, backgrounds, images, cursor, and sound effects are all pilfered from packages of clip art. If you haven't already tried the style switcher, check it out - I made multiple versions to show off how many different designs can be made using clip art (and a little bit of editing, for transparent backgrounds or changing colors)!
Reason four: Diversify the image pool!
I think it's good to find new sources of images and get more images circulating around the web. Sifting through clip art archives gives you the opportunity to do your own curating and introduce people to pictures they may not have ever seen before, rather than picking from collections of images that have already been curated by multiple people online via pinterest, carrd, tumblr, and neocities. Go digging around and find some images that no one has laid eyes on in a decade and give them a place to shine!
If everybody's passing around the same handful of pictures, things will get boring pretty quickly, so I think it's good to get regular injections of NEW STUFF circulating.
Reason five: I think it is good to practice finding beauty in unexpected places and cultivate appreciation for what already exists!
So, where can you get ahold of this great stuff? Well, all over the place, but I'll focus here on the fantastic Internet Archive! The Internet Archive's software section has a gallery dedicated to photo and clip art CDs that you can check out! These largely exist in the legal grey area of abandonware.
You can also find these CD collections at secondhand stores, in bargain bins, at yard sales and flea markets!
Here I will give you a small walkthrough on how to acquire some clip art.
Step One: Download The Thing.Alright. I have gone to archive dot org's clip art section and selected what I want. I have decided that I want Task Force Clip Art: Really Big Edition, which has 10,000 images in it!
Let's get downloading.
It might take a little bit. This one's not so bad, but some of these clipart collections are really big and need some time to download!
Step Two: Extract The Thing.
Now we have the ISO downloaded. A lot of CD uploads come in the form of .iso files; an ISO file is basically just a copy of a whole CD. In order to open it, you'll need to do what's called "mounting" it - that's telling your computer "hey, there's totally a disk in your disk drive." You can use a program like Power ISO to open ISOs easily! That's what I'll use.
Ignore Power ISO's pleas for registration; like with WinRAR, it's not necessary to use the software.
Whatever setup and programs it has built in for browsing the images is probably outdated junk that might not even run on your computer anyway; and even if it did, I would advise against installing anything these things have without taking some precautions! Just ignore all of that and look for a folder that just has the images inside of it.
Let's extract this TFBIG folder so we can peruse its contents! Power ISO has an extract button, but I just click and drag the folder into my Clip Art folder. It takes a little bit to copy over all those images! Power ISO might complain while it works. It seems to get a little stressed out when I make it do big tasks... nothing is actually broken as far as I can tell, though.
Step Three: Look At The Thing.
As you saw, this disk contains a couple of different types of files: BMP - bitmap; WMF - Windows Media File; and CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile. CGM is an old format for vector graphics; the only thing I have that can open it is LibreOFfice, which is not a great way to browse images. I'm not super interested in vector stuff, but if you are you'll need to get your hands on some old vector-compatible programs!
For the WMF and BMP images, you might or might not be able to view them already. If you can't: I recommend IrfanView, an image-viewing program! In addition to helping with viewing images of various types, it also lets you bulk-convert images from one filetype to another. I'm going to go ahead and bulk convert the WMF files into PNGs. It's best to do this one folder at a time - if you include all of the subfolders at once, the results won't be sorted!
I forgot about that halfway through and had to panic-stop the bulk conversion and start over again, so I don't have a good screenshot of the bulk convert interface. Sorry...
Now it's much easier to browse! Here's some kind of animal I found:
Ta-daa! Now you know.
Here's some videos for you for making it to the end - a cool video by Linus Bowman about the history of clip art:
And this wonderful song by Louie Zong.
Materials used in this entry came from: