what happened to clipart?
What does this picture invoke for you?
If you're one of these zoomer types there's a decent chance you feel pretty indifferent.
On the other hand, if you were born in the early 2000s or before, this could have just unlocked
a forgotten memory.
These pictures and unusually styled artwork were examples of the sort of stuff you could find in clipart.
Clipart was an online image library built into a few Microsoft office products.
Instead of taking images from google, you could just open clipart in word and find an appropriate image
from the same program.
If you try and use clipart nowadays, Microsoft just sends you over to a Bing image search.
The craziest thing is clipart went away on the 1st of December 2014.
We've been without clipart for almost a decade, yet no one really seems to remember.
The first time clipart was included in word was word 6.0, in 1993. It came with just 82 illustrations.
Over time, the clipart library moved online and eventually acted as a library of over 100,000 assets,
both animated an static.
This wasn't the first library of its kind though. IBM had a clip art library provided with a piece of software
called VCN Execuvision in 1983. Generally, these little illustrations were intended for presentations too.
Back in the day, there were no high quality digital illustration tools for making sonic ____ images to post on
DeviantArt.
Artists were limited to very rudimentary tools, which basically allowed for simple line art.
Which is why there were tens of thousands of illustrations like this floating around.
There was a shift in the mid 90s from painstakingly handcrafted vector graphics, which were ground-breaking at the time, to
mass produced low quality crud. A lot of clip art at the time was distributed in packages containing just a few hundred graphics at a time.
Technological advancements soon made it possible to churn out loads of the things though, and before long there were hundreds
of thousands of clip art assets floating around, thanks to a company called T/Maker, who were pioneers in the clip art game.
They were like the Pixar of badly drawn illustrations for putting on Velma's 70th birthday card.
After making serious bank from the dawn of vector art in 1987, which they made using the first version of Adobe Illustrator,
the company eventually ended up being the publishers responsible for over half a million copyright free images.
That was pretty immense for nearly 30 years ago, given Adobe illustrator looked like this at the time:
The mammoth scale of their operation definitely puts a downer on Microsoft's clip art library, which was sat at around
140,000 when it finally got laid to rest.
clipart had two main benefits. Everything in it had a creative commons licence, meaning you could produce
documents including any image you found on there without getting into trouble, whilst also being
super convenient. Especially in the early years, Google images was far less capable than it is now, so clipart
genuinely was one of the best ways to get art for a specific query.
When people were a whole lot less technologically literate, it was common that a school or office
computer would almost solely be based around work in word, Excel or PowerPoint. Having a convenient built in
image library turned out to be a great move, and remnants from the clipart era can still be found everywhere.
I guarantee that if you walk into a library, church, village hall or pub, you're probably going to come across some
clipart hung up somewhere.
Now clipart is synonymous with Microsoft software, and most people think of this when you say clipart,
but the term actually refers to a much more broad and difficult to define area of art.
According to Wikipedia, Clip art is simply a type of graphic art, which is generally composed exclusively of illustrations
and not photographs.
That was partly what makes old PowerPoints so interesting. You would hardly ever find high res stock images
or fancy graphics, more so just these really weird and abstract images in this art style you wouldn't really find anywhere else.
I hated the art at the time, but now I look back on this era of technology fondly. It was a simpler time,
where my friends and I would play cool maths games, which is also gone, if we finished our work in the IT lesson before
the lesson had ended.
Flash games, that paperclip fella and clip art are but three casualties of man's insatiable thirst for innovation, but comic sans is slowly
dying too. Hopefully we can keep it going for decades to come, but the last time I saw a printed comic sans document was at a restaurant in Spain
last year.
I might need to go to my local GP for a trip down memory lane, because they still love Windows XP and comic sans for some reason.
So how do you feel about clip art, do you love it, do you hate it?