Examples of computer clip arts. (Source: Open Clip Art Library)
Clip art, in cilpart the graphic arts, refers to pre-made images used to illustrate clippart any media. Today, clip art is used extensively in both personal and commercial projects, ranging cllipart from home-printed greeting cards to commercial candles. Clip art comes in many forms, clipartt both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is created, distributed, and used in an electronic form. Since its inception, clip art clipat has clipsrt evolved to include a wide variety of content, file formats, illustration styles, and licensing restrictions. Clip art ckipart is generally composed exclusively of illustrations (created by hand or by computer software), and does not include stock clipaart photography.
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Contents
- 1 History
- 2 File Formats
- 3 Image Rights
- 4 External links
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History
The term "clip art" cliparrt originated through the practice of physically cutting images from pre-existing printed works cipart for use in other publishing projects. Before the advent of computers in publishing, clip art was used through a process called lipart paste up. Many clip art images in this era qualified as line art. In this process, vlipart the clip art images are cut out by hand, then attached via adhesives to clipatr a board representing a clipary scale size of the finished, printed work. After the addition of text and art created through free clipart phototypesetting, the finished, camera-ready pages are called mechanicals. Since the 1990s, nearly all publishers have replaced the paste clipart up process with desktop publishing.
After the introduction of mass-produced personal computers download free clipart such as the IBM PC in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the microsoft clipart widespread use of clip art by animated clipart consumers became possible through the invention of desktop publishing. Most people credit volleyball clipart Apple Computer with providing desktop publishing with the tools required to make it a reality for consumers, with the introduction football clipart of the Macintosh's graphical user interface (GUI) in 1984 and the LaserWriter laser wedding clipart printer in late school clipart 1985. After software maker Aldus introduced PageMaker in 1985, professional quality desktop publishing became possible with consumer desktop computers.
After 1986, desktop publishing christian clipart generated a widespread need for pre-made, electronic images halloween clipart as consumers began to produce newsletters and brochures using their own computers. Electronic clip art emerged to fill the need. Early electronic flower clipart clip art was simple line art disney clipart or bitmap images due to the lack of sophisticated electronic illustration american flags clipart tools. With the introduction of the Apple Macintosh program MacPaint, consumers were free wedding clipart provided the ability to edit and use bitmapped clip art for the first time. In 1986, Adobe birthday clipart Systems introduced Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, allowing home computer users the first baby clipart opportunity to manipulate vector art in a GUI.
One of the first successful electronic cheerleading clipart clip art pioneers was T/Maker Company, a Mountain View, California company which had pirate clipart its early roots with an alternative word processor, WriteNow, commissioned for the Macintosh by free disney clipart Steve Jobs. T/Maker boldly traded ease-of-use for print resolution and quality by hiring accomplished illustrators to produce food clipart vector clip art for the classroom clipart Macintosh. Beginning in 1987 under the brand name "ClickArt", T/Maker published small, retail collections of vector clip art, free christian clipart despite widespread unfamiliarity with the bezier curves required to edit vector art. However, graphic designers and bulldog clipart many consumers free football clipart 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 medical clipart early golf clipart 1990s. In 1994, T/Maker was sold to Deluxe Corp and then two years later to its main rival, Broderbund.
With widespread adoption of the CD-ROM christmas clipart in the early 1990s, several pre-computer clip art companies such as Dover bowling clipart Publications also began offering electronic clip art.
The mid-1990s ushered in more innovation in the clip art cartoon clipart industry, as computer clipart well as a marketing focus on quantity over quality. Even T/Maker, whose success was built pig clipart upon selling small, high quality clip art packages of approximately 200 images, began to get interested in the volume clip free halloween clipart art market. In March, 1995, T/Maker became the exclusive publisher of over 500,000 copyright-free star clipart images which fall clipart was, at the time, one of the world's largest clip art libraries. This licensing clipart free agreement was subsequently transferred to Broderbund.
Also during this period, word processing companies, sun clipart 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 cheerleader clipart files as part of its default installation. Today, Microsoft offers clip art as part music clipart of over eagle clipart 140,000 media elements in the Microsoft Office product suite.
Other companies such as Nova Development and Clip Art Incorporated also free sports clipart pioneered the marketing of large clip art collections in cross clipart the late 1990s, including Nova's "Art Explosion" series, which sold heart clipart clip art in increasingly large libraries up to a million images.
Between 1998 autumn clipart and 2001, T/Maker's clip art assets were sold each year as a result of some of the largest mergers and acquisitions western clipart in the computer software industry, including those of The Learning free cartoon clipart Company (in 1998) and Mattel (in 1989). All of T/Maker's clip art is currently marketed through patriotic clipart the Broderbund division of the Irish company animated military clipart Riverdeep.
In the early 2000s, the World Wide Web continued to gain popularity as a retail software distribution channel, and several companies pioneered the sale cheer clipart of sports clipart clip art through online, searchable libraries, including Clipart.com (part of Jupiter Media), WeddingClipart.com (part of Letters and Arts Incorporated), and GraphicsFactory.com (part of butterfly clipart Clip Art Incorporated). Because of the Web, clip art is now not only sold cliparts through retail channels as packaged bundles of religious clipart images, but also as individual images and subscriptions to entire libraries (which allow basketball clipart you to download an unlimited number of images for the duration of the subscription).
In the mid-2000s, the free animated clipart clip art market is segmented in several different ways, including the frog clipart data type, the art style, the delivery medium, and the free school clipart marketing method.
Clip art is divided into two different data types represented by many different file formats: bitmap and vector free walt disney clipart art. Clip art vendors may provide images car clipart of just one type or both. The delivery medium of tiger clipart a clip art product varies from different types of traditionally boxed retail packages to online download sites. Clip art is sold fish clipart via both traditional and web-based retail channels (as with Nova free cliparts Development products), as well as via online, searchable libraries (as with Clipart.com). luau clipart Clip art vendors typically market clip art by focusing either on quantity or vertical market cat clipart specialty. The marketing method often goes hand in hand with the lds clipart art style of the clip art sold.
To compete largely on quantity, some clip art vendors teddy bear clipart must produce or license new and old clip art collections in volume. Clip art marketed in school related clipart this way is often less expensive but simpler in structure soccer clipart and detail, as is typified by cartoons, line art, and symbols (e.g. math clipart Nova Development, Clipart.com and GraphicsFactory.com). Clip art which is sold according to smaller, specialized subject genres pumpkin clipart tends to be more complex, modern, detailed, and expensive (e.g. WeddingClipart.com, GoodSalt.com).
File Formats
Electronic clip art free volleyball clipart is available in several different file formats. It is important for clip free christmas clipart 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 teacher clipart they need.
Clip art dance clipart file formats are divided into 2 different types: bitmap or vector graphics.
Bitmap (or "rasterized") file formats are used to monkey clipart describe rectangular images made up of a grid of free golf clipart multicolored or black and white pixels. Scanned photos, for example, make use of a bitmap file format. Bitmap happy birthday clipart images are always limited in quality by their resolution, which must be fixed at the airplane clipart time the file is created. money clipart If the image is not rectangular, then it is saved on a default background color (usually white) defined by the smallest motorcycle clipart bounding rectangle in which the image fits.
Because of their fixed cowboy clipart resolution, printing bitmap images can easily labor day clipart produce grainy, jaggy, or blurry results if the resolution is not ideally suited to the printer science clipart resolution. In addition, bitmap images become grainy when they are free kids clipart scaled larger than their intended resolution. A few bitmap file formats (such as Apple's PICT format) support alpha channels, which allow bitmap images fairy clipart to have transparent backgrounds or an image selection which uses antialiasing. Most common web-based free food clipart file formats such as GIF, JPEG, and angel clipart PNG are bitmap file formats. The GIF file format is one of the simplest, low-resolution bitmap arrow clipart file formats, only supporting 256 colors per image. baseball clipart As a result, however, GIF files can be extremely small in file size. Other common bitmap file caduceus clipart formats are BMP (Windows bitmap), TGA, and TIFF. Most clip art tennis clipart is provided in a low resolution, bitmap file format which is unsuitable for scaling, transparent backgrounds, or good-quality summer clipart printed materials. However, beach clipart bitmap file formats are ideal for photos, especially when combined with lossy church clipart data compression algorithms such as those available for JPEG files.
In contrast to the grid format of bitmap clipart fairy images, Vector graphics file formats use geometric modeling to describe an image as a series of points, lines, curves, panther clipart and polygons. Because the image is described using geometric data instead of fixed pixels, educational clipart the image can be scaled to any size while retaining "resolution independence", meaning that family clipart the image can be bee clipart printed at the highest resolution a printer supports, resulting in a clear, crisp image. Vector file formats are black and white clipart usually superior in resolution and ease of editing as compared to bitmap file formats, construction clipart but are not as widely supported by software hawaiian clipart and are not well-suited for storing pixel-specific data such as scanned photographs. In the early years of paw prints clipart electronic clip art, vector illustrations were limited to simple line art representations. softball clipart However, by the early 2000s, vector illustration tools could produce virtually the dragon clipart same illustrations as bitmap illustration tools, while still providing all free baby clipart of the advantages of vector file formats. The most common vector file format is Adobe's EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file format. Microsoft back to school clipart has a much simpler, free educational clipart less sophisticated vector file format called WMF (Windows Metafile). The World free downloadable clipart Wide Web Consortium has developed a new, XML-based vector file format called SVG palm tree clipart (Scalable Vector Graphics) which may be supported by all web browsers in the party clipart future (Firefox and Opera currently support the format). For those with image-editing experience or interest to work with vector file formats, vector tree clipart clip art provides the most flexible, kids clipart highest quality images.
Image Rights
All clip art usage is governed by the terms of military clipart individual copyrights and usage rights. The copyright and usage rights of a clip art image are important to understand apple clipart so that the image is used in a legal, permitted way. The three most common categories balloon clipart of image rights border clipart are royalty free, rights managed, and public domain.
Most commercial clip art is free softball clipart sold with a limited royalty free license which allows customers to use the image for most personal, educational and non-profit house clipart applications. Some royalty free clip art also includes limited commercial rights free western clipart (the right to use images in for-profit products). However, royalty free image rights often vary from vendor children clipart to vendor.
Some fine free birthday clipart art clip art is still sold on a rights managed basis. However this type of image rights free turtle clipart have seen a steep decline in the past 20 years as royalty free licenses have become the preferred model for clip picnic clipart art.
Public domain lion clipart images continue to be one of the most popular types of clip art because the image rights are free. However, clipart borders many images are erroneously described as part of the public domain are actually rainbow clipart copyrighted, and thus illegal to use without proper permissions. The main cause for this confusion is due rose clipart to the fact that once a public book clipart domain image is redrawn or edited in any way, it becomes a brand new image which is copyrightable by graduation clipart the editor.
The United States District Court ruled in camping clipart 1999 as part of Bridgeman Art Library v. vector clipart Corel Corp that exact copies of public domain images were not protected by US bible clipart copyright law, however the scope of this ruling only applies to free basketball clipart photographs currently. It is originality, not skill, experience or effort, which affects copyrightability of derivative images. In fact, the US Supreme education clipart Court in Feist v. Rural ruled that the difficulty of labor and expenses indian clipart must be rejected as considerations in copyrightability. So until blue flower clipart the courts rule otherwise, it is generally accepted that the creativity required to reproduce an free religious clipart illustration by hand is intrinsically original, and therefore protected by copyright law.
For example, the large clip art libraries people clipart produced by Dover Publications or the University native american clipart of South Florida's Clipart ETC project are based on public domain images, but because they thanksgiving clipart have been scanned and edited by hand, they are now copyrighted images, subject to very specific usage giraffe clipart policies. In leaf clipart order for a clip art image based on a public domain source to be truly in the public domain, you must have masonic clipart the proper rights granted to you alligator clipart by the individual or organization which digitized and edited the original source of the image (for example, an original book).
The popularity dove clipart of the Web has facilitated widespread copying of pirated clip art which fitness clipart is then sold or given away as "free clip superman clipart art". The reality is that most clip free black and white clipart art touted as "free" is actually illegally distributed. Virtually all images published after January 1, 1923 still enjoy library clipart copyright protection under the federal laws of most piano clipart countries. Images published prior to 1923 need to be carefully researched to make sure they are in the public domain.
The exception for clip art devil clipart illustrations created after 1923 are those which are earth clipart specifically donated to the public domain by the artist or publisher. For free medical clipart vector art, the open source community established the Open Clip Art Library in 2004 as a clearinghouse for camera clipart images which are legitimately donated to the public domain by their karate clipart copyright owners. By 2006, the free clipart for teachers library contained over 6,500 images.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
clipart
- Free Clip Arts
- Open Clip Art Library
- Clip Art category at Open Directory Project
- Free clip art for weather clipart personal use
- Free Clip Art for Kids and Teens
- Free Clip Art for Kids from free business clipart Dorling Kindersley
- Free Clip Art for Electronics and Chemical Engineering
Category: Graphic train clipart design