clip art

clip art

The Evolution and Impact of Clip Art in Visual Communication

1. Introduction to Clip Art

The evolution of these properties in digitized reproduction and storage has spawned fascinating issues surmounting controversies rapidly becoming trivial with the passage of years. After all, in the earliest steps of digitalizing visuals, time was consumed in static, monochromatic images using line, circles, and color fills influenced by painting and drawing programs, programs typically used by expert computer scientists/artists. As the desktop computer software developed, non-expert computer users of business, government, and educational institutions were introduced to easy, intuitive, and cost-effective methods in drawing and editing digitized images to produce documents. The concept of clip art became a practical, popular concept conveying the digital computer’s ability to draw, edit, and store an easily selected library of simple, compound, and/or complex visual metaphors.

The concept of clip art is a uniquely modern one, drawing upon principles of utility for the digital revolution, in that it represents a new form of how images were produced, organized, and distributed in service of an evolving conception of what a high level of visual literacy constitutes in society. While principles of creating and selecting images fulfilling visual communication need have been established for generations, the ease of digital creation and storage makes easily accessible all the favored computer illustrated images for marketing, instructional, and informative use. The educators, researchers, and business performers utilizing computer clip art need to be aware of the persuasive uses in the communication of errors or intended fallacies, the biases of the image frames, and a lack of a comprehensive image selection indicative of the purposes of goal orientations grounded in action.

2. Historical Development of Clip Art

The expressed intention of a few early printed works was to inform through images rather than image-mediated text. The production of early printed literature coupled image and text in strikingly vivid presentations designed to elucidate works with both technical and didactic content. These multifunctional images were designed to facilitate mass book distribution and impelled the development of clip art. Intelligent design of all forms of printed matter greatly enhances communication quality and therefore relevance and usefulness. Today, mostly we take the integrated variety of information and communication technologies for granted. We assume the availability of powerful creative and processing tools for visual or verbal information. Such an assumption was far from accurate only a few generations ago.

Images or symbols have long been critical tools to visualize and portray information and concepts. Early in the historical development of the printed page, letters of the alphabet and words were illustrated or complemented with relevant iconography, such as page numbering, marginalia, headers, and footers in manuscripts. These devices of visual communication ultimately comprised what we have come to know as clip art, allowing for concepts and concrete objects to share equal prominence in the printed document. Liberal access to both of these elements was central to the widespread adoption and effectiveness of publishing via the printed page. Illustrations enable the public to more easily understand and accept new ideas. The public is interested in illustrations as well as in facts, particularly when images illuminate complex processes and ideas.

3. Clip Art in Modern Visual Communication

Today, numerous graphical images are available for computer users through a variety of software applications. The term clip art usually refers to a selection of simple, inexpensive graphic images of common objects, commonplace symbols, and easy-to-use drawings created for use in personal and professional documents. Clip art can often be customized for use by resizing, changing colors, and combining with other elements. The majority of the clip art now used is computerized; however, traditional hard-copy art collections are still available at reduced costs since software technology has expanded and enhanced collections that were well established in the pre-computer age. In addition, digital cameras and graphics digitizers help produce new clip art images.

Since its advent, the use of clip art has evolved from exclusive applications in publishing to general ease of access and flexibility across a variety of forms, from word processing to presentation programs. In today’s wired world, people from all walks of life face a wide range of visual communication tasks. “Just a few years ago, creating those visual messages meant spending hours, days, or even weeks working with traditional art supplies and equipment. But new digital technologies are making it easier and faster for everyone – in business, social service, schools, and the home alike – to communicate a message visually.” In a recent white paper on the future of education in a digital world, summarized the degree of change in technology images and clip art as one sign of a fundamental change in the way we use computers.

4. The Influence of Clip Art on Design Trends

The design of these first digital images clearly distinguished the digital epoch from the other visual epochs of the productive society of the mid-twentieth century. In an industrial society, visions and landscapes of progress were embedded in buildings, machines, and tools. During the digital epoch, clip art defined a different type of society, with ideals and aspirations associated with digital business and communication. Since these early years, clip art has been part of our visual landscape and is emblematically digital. It has evolved through the three worlds of computer technology, from the time-sharing period to what the Apple Macintosh introduced in 1984, and finally through widespread Internet connections. The quick strides taken during the digital epoch were accompanied by a growing versatility and interactivity and an increasingly complex digital landscape.

The first device-specific digital designs emerged alongside the first personal computers and, with the latter, suggested a whole new approach to making visual information, as displayed on-screen or in print. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, users began to experience and adopt new possibilities with personal computing. In these years, those who grew up with the computer were presented with its graphical potential. They learned what “screen image” meant when the screen was no longer the public computer screen of a data processing center, but instead a part of the home or work desk where everyone could see. Clip art programs were “interactive” in that they were meant for use, to be launched, interacted with, and closed with elegance and simplicity. Clip art was inserted directly within documents and posters. Clip art visual culture was not socially represented through galleries or printed picture books or engraved mineral rocks, but was brought to life at specific times by specific needs and expectations.

5. The Future of Clip Art in the Digital Age

However, the application of clip art in communication may be suffering in the digital age. Size libraries sometimes make it difficult to find related images while working online. Additionally, publishers race to fill online galleries with new images that attract the interests of website viewers may be making it harder to find quality clip art that is useful. The growth of social networking and video services with photorealistic content to enhance activities, promote businesses, and attract other people’s attention may be driving a demand for photorealism and drawing efforts to create more convincing and realistic drawings. A greater demand for animated or other more interactive forms of drawing may have a similar effect. There are an increasing number of clip art websites that have shifted to the sale of photographs and photorealistic drawings for businesses or other uses. As a result, there are concerns that the use of more traditional 2D and 3D hand-rendered line art will decline.

The advent of modern desktop publishing and drawing software, the drawing tablet, and advances in other digital technologies appear to have eliminated the barriers to entry that could have quashed the digital era of clip art. Advances in network and computer hardware have contributed to the accelerated growth of digital clip art service providers. They have used the Internet to create digital clip art libraries that are large and accessible at a fraction of the cost of print libraries. The Internet allows people to download new images in moments, and people can maintain a complete library without the waste of digital storage media that would have been required by an equivalent print library. As a result, many popular digital clip art libraries in use today predate the year 2000.