Clip Art Libraries
Borrowing From Peter to Post for Paul

Web Explosion 20,000
Image Farm
Digital Stock
PhotoDisc

Clip art libraries are vast, theme-oriented collections of pre-fab illustrations and stock photographs that have already been digitized, and possibly even converted into JPEG and GIF files. Some libraries come on CD-ROM, some can be directly accessed online, and some are available via both media. In general, clip art can range in quality from cheesy 2-Kb button bars and navigational arrows all the way up to beautiful 10-Mb images shot by studio photographers.

Different types of Webmasters need different types of clip art for different reasons. If you have low creative aspirations, and you're augmenting a large corporate site on a daily basis, you may do well to save your time and energy for site administration, and use clip art to embellish your site's otherwise boring-looking text. By the same token, if you're a legitimate online "creative director," and you need a very specific, high-quality image, you may do well to save the time and money you'd use shooting original art and instead do a quick search of a stock photo library for just the right shot.

Pluses Really good clip art is like eating out instead of cooking at home, and even really bad clip art is like popping a TV dinner in the microwave. In other words, you won't find a more convenient route to image acquisition. First, using clip art requires no artistic skills whatsoever; you only need to know what you like. Second, it requires no technical skills; no time spent with monstrous user manuals. Third, it's quite easy to find exactly what you're looking for; all clip art collections are organized by theme, and many can be searched by keyword. Fourth, because the libraries are organized by theme, you can leverage a single school of imagery to give your site a consistent look and feel.

Minuses Sure, it's fast, convenient, and often pre-digested for the Web, but every time you use clip art, you're abandoning an opportunity to brand your site with a personal trademark. What's more, a lot of clip art is just plain ugly, and has single-handedly lowered property values on the Webbut that's what you get when a single overworked illustrator is asked to create 600 dramatically different button bars under a three-day deadline.

Finally, once a clip art collection becomes popular, it builds an inertia of its own, and begins appearing on every low-rent Web site from here to Atlantic City. True story: Last January, Heidi Swanson, our Webmaster, was working on her computer when she suddenly shrieked in horror, and ran from her desk. We later found her in the women's rest room, lying on the tile in a fetal position. When we went back to her computer to see what all the hubbub was about, we found her browser pointed to yet another site displaying the ubiquitous "roaring flame" GIF animation. We, of course, assured her that everything would be OK, but we all knew in our hearts that such severe emotional wounds rarely heal completely.

Options It goes without saying that the Web itself is the largest source of clip art, but grabbing someone else's original image is akin to stealing, and we won't encourage it here. On the other hand, many personal home pages offer "free image samples," but if you look at some of these collections closely, you'll find the "free samples" have simply been lifted from commercial libraries. While the Web itself offers a vast image clearinghouse, commercial products will give you full license to post at will.

Nova's Web Explosion 20,000 CD-ROM suite ($TK) comes with 10,000 buttons, 7000 illustrations, 1000 photos, 1000 dividers, 750 backgrounds, 500 bullets, 250 banners, and 250 textures. Hey, that adds up to 20,750 things! Color and whimsy abound in this collection. It's perfect for children and pre-teens. For truly elegant imagery with a strong focus on background textures, you can turn to