Clip art


Clip art is a type of graphic art. Pieces are pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Today, clip art is used extensively and comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is created, distributed, and used in a digital form. Since its inception, clip art has evolved to include a wide variety of content, file formats, illustration styles, and licensing restrictions. It is generally composed exclusively of illustrations, and does not include stock photography.

History

The term "clipart" originated from the practice of physically cutting images from pre-existing printed works for use in other publishing projects. Originally called "printer's cuts," "stock cuts" or "electrotype cuts," before the advent of computers in desktop publishing, clip art was used through a process called paste up. Many clip art images of this era qualified as line art. In this process, the clip art images are cut out by hand from booklets or sheets sold by stock art studios or print companies and then attached via adhesives to a board representing a scale size of the finished, printed work. After the addition of text and art created through phototypesetting or dry-transfer lettering, the finished, camera-ready pages were sent to print.
Since the 1990s, nearly all publishers have replaced the paste up process with desktop publishing. After the introduction of mass-produced personal computers such as the IBM PC in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the widespread use of clip art by consumers became possible through the invention of desktop publishing. For the IBM PC, the first library of professionally drawn clip art was provided with VCN ExecuVision, introduced in 1983. These images were used in business presentations, as well as for other types of presentations. It was the Apple Computer, with its GUI which provided desktop publishing with the tools required to make it a reality for consumers. The LaserWriter laser printer, as well as software maker Aldus PageMaker in 1985, helped to make professional quality desktop publishing a reality, with consumer desktop computers.
File:Bill Atkinson—creator of MacPaint—painted in MacPaint.jpg|thumb|A MacPaint illustration of Bill Atkinson, the software's creator
After 1986, desktop publishing generated a widespread need for pre-made, electronic images as consumers began to produce newsletters and brochures using their own computers. Electronic clip art emerged to fill the need. Early electronic clip art was simple line art or bitmap images due to the lack of sophisticated electronic illustration tools. With the introduction of the Apple Macintosh program MacPaint, consumers were provided the ability to edit and use bit-mapped clip art for the first time. One of the first successful electronic clip art pioneers was T/Maker Company, a Mountain View, California, company, which had its early roots with an alternative word processor WriteNow, commissioned for the Macintosh by Steve Jobs. Beginning in 1984, T/Maker took advantage of the capability of the Macintosh to provide bit-mapped graphics in black and white; by publishing small, retail collections of these images under the brand name "ClickArt". The first version of "ClickArt" was a mixed collection of images designed for personal use. The illustrators who created the first "serious" clip art for business/organizational use were Mike Mathis, Joan Shogren, and Dennis Fregger; published by T/Maker in 1984 as "ClickArt Publications".
In 1986, the first vector-based clip art disc was released by Composite, a small desktop publishing company based in Eureka, California. The black-and-white art was painstakingly created by Rick Siegfried with MacDraw, sometimes using hundreds of simple objects combined to create complex images. It was released on a single-sided floppy disc. Also in 1986, Adobe Systems introduced Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, allowing home computer users the first opportunity to manipulate vector art in a GUI. This made the higher-resolution vector art possible and in 1987 T/Maker published the first vector-based clip art images made with Illustrator, despite widespread unfamiliarity with the Bézier curves required to edit vector art. However, graphic designers and many consumers quickly realized the enormous advantages of vector art, and T/Maker's clip art became the gold standard of the industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1994, T/Maker was sold to Deluxe Corp and then two years later to its main rival, Broderbund.
With the widespread adoption of the CD-ROM in the early 1990s, several pre-computer clip art companies such as Dover Publications also began offering electronic clip art.
The mid-1990s ushered in more innovation in the clip art industry, as well as a marketing focus on quantity over quality. Even T/Maker, whose success was built upon selling small, high-quality clip art packages of approximately 200 images, began to get interested in the volume clip art market. In March 1995, T/Maker became the exclusive publisher of over 500,000 copyright-free images which was, at the time, one of the world's largest clip art libraries. This licensing agreement was subsequently transferred to Broderbund. In 1996, Zedcor was the first company to offer clip art images, illustrations, and photos for download as part of an online subscription. Also during this period, word processing companies, including Microsoft, began offering clip art as a built-in feature of their products. In 1996, Microsoft Word 6.0 included only 82 WMF clip art files as part of its default installation. In 2014, Microsoft offered clip art as part of over 140,000 media elements on the Microsoft Office website.
Other companies such as Nova Development and Clip Art Incorporated also pioneered the marketing of large clip art collections in the late 1990s, including Nova's "Art Explosion" series, which sold clip art in increasingly large libraries up to a million images. Between 1998 and 2001, T/Maker's clip art assets were sold each year as a result of some of the largest mergers and acquisitions in the computer software industry, including those of The Learning Company and Mattel. All of T/Maker's clip art is currently marketed through the Broderbund division of the Irish company Riverdeep.
In the early 2000s, the World Wide Web continued to gain popularity as a retail software distribution channel, and several other companies started to license clip art through online, searchable libraries, including iCLIPART.com, WeddingClipart.com, and GraphicsFactory.com. Because of the Web, clip art is now not only sold through retail channels as packaged bundles of images, but also as individual images and subscriptions to entire libraries. In the mid-2000s, the clip art market is segmented in several different ways, including the data type, the art style, the delivery medium, and the marketing method.
On December 1, 2014, Microsoft officially ended its support for the online Clip Art library in Microsoft Office products. These programs now guide users to the Bing image search. Clip art is divided into two different data types represented by many different file formats: bitmap and vector art. Clip art vendors may provide images of just one type or both. The delivery medium of a clip art product varies from different types of traditionally boxed retail packages to online download sites. Clip art is sold via both traditional and web-based retail channels, as well as via online, searchable libraries. Clip art vendors typically market clip art by focusing either on quantity or vertical market specialty. The marketing method often goes hand in hand with the art style of the clip art sold. To compete largely on quantity, some clip art vendors must produce or license new and old clip art collections in volume. Clip art marketed in this way is often less expensive but simpler in structure and detail, as is typified by cartoons, line art, and symbols. Clip art which is sold according to smaller, specialized subject genres tends to be more complex, modern, detailed, and expensive.

File formats

Electronic clip art is available in several different file formats. It is important for clip art users to understand the differences between file formats so that they can use an appropriate image file and get the resolution and detail results they need.
Clip art file formats are divided into 2 different types: bitmap or vector graphics. Bitmap file formats are used to describe rectangular images made up of a grid of colored or grayscale pixels. Scanned photos, for example, make use of a bitmap file format. Bitmap images are always limited in quality by their resolution, which must be fixed at the time the file is created. If the image is not rectangular, then it is saved on a default background color defined by the smallest bounding rectangle in which the image fits. Because of their fixed resolution, printing bitmap images can easily produce grainy, jaggy, or blurry results if the resolution is not ideally suited to the printer resolution. In addition, bitmap images become grainy when they are scaled larger than their intended resolution. A few bitmap file formats support alpha channels, which allow bitmap images to have transparent backgrounds or an image selection which uses antialiasing. Most common web-based file formats such as GIF, JPEG, and PNG are bitmap file formats. The GIF File format is one of the simplest, low-resolution bitmap file formats, only supporting 256 colors per image. As a result, however, GIF files can be extremely small in file size. Other common bitmap file formats are BMP, TGA, and TIFF. Most clip art is provided in a low resolution, bitmap file format which is unsuitable for scaling, transparent backgrounds, or good-quality printed materials. However, bitmap file formats are ideal for photos, especially when combined with lossy data compression algorithms such as those available for JPEG files.
In contrast to the grid format of bitmap images, Vector graphics file formats use geometric modeling to describe an image as a series of points, lines, curves, and polygons. Because the image is described using geometric data instead of fixed pixels, the image can be scaled to any size while retaining "resolution independence", meaning that the image can be printed at the highest resolution a printer supports, resulting in a clear, crisp image. Vector file formats are usually superior in resolution and ease of editing as compared to bitmap file formats, but are not as widely supported by software and are not well-suited for storing pixel-specific data such as scanned photographs. In the early years of electronic clip art, vector illustrations were limited to simple line art representations. However, by the early 2000s, vector illustration tools could produce virtually the same illustrations as bitmap illustration tools, while still providing all of the advantages of vector file formats. The most common vector file format is Adobe's EPS file format. Microsoft has a much simpler, less sophisticated vector file format called WMF. The World Wide Web Consortium has developed a new, XML-based vector file format called SVG and all major modern web browsers - including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari have at least some degree of support for SVG and can render the markup directly. For those with image-editing experience or interest to work with vector file formats, vector clip art provides the most flexible, highest quality images.