Clipart and dingbats

Clipart

Clipart (or clip art) is any kind of predesigned images and, ready made symbols to use in a program of design or desktop publishing. The original term made reference to paper cuts, “stock cuts” that were pasted in different projects. The clients of these services of publication of clipart were mainly the mass media and the advertising agencies. Different companies published and sold collections of drawings that were used this way in the illustrations, normally without paying additional rights of author. One publishing, Dover, has published deservedly famous books with old book illustrations, free of author copyrights.

After the digital revolution, although still it is possible to handle clipart from “cuts”, everybody works with the digital version of this idea: image files that can be used directly. Any domestic user has, probably, a good collection of clipart, sometimes without even knowing it. Clipart is a very wide term, since it includes very different file types and, therefore, only suitable for certain uses or which can only be used within very specific applications.

Vectorial Clipart

The most flexible clipart is the one which can be opened and edited in a wide variety of programs, and which can be resized or reshaped without losing definition. Briefly: vectorial illustrations. The advantages of the vectorial illustration are commented in detail in its own article, and we have explained the process of creation of this type of graphic art in the tracing, step-by-step illustration and other articles.

The preferred vectorial formats are EPS and metafile formats (WMF, EMF.) Most graphic design programs can open or import them, and sometimes edit them. Anyway, each program may have lots of clipart in its specific format; for example, with CorelDraw there is one ton of clipart images in its own CDR vectorial format. In order to open files of this type with a more recent version, it is necessary often to import them as if they came from a different application.

Bitmap clipart

It is not used as much in the publishing world, mainly because of the difficulties that you find to customize it to a specific project, in special if it implies to change its size. But with the popularity of the Web, it is becoming something usual to offer clipart in form of GIF or JPEG, ready to link to webpages. The GIF, in addition, can contain a basic animation. Thousands of files of this type are available in the net. In this sense, nevertheless, vectorial clipart continues being equally flexible and useful for the creation of icons and images for the Web: it is enough with exporting the image, once finished, in the format, GIF, PNG or JPEG.

Editing clipart.

We must be aware that if we have a CD-ROM with a million images, probably there will be 950,000 of them that we’ll never ever think of using. And probably 90% of the rest is so ordinary or vulgar that we we won’t use it neither. It may be expensive to buy a big collection, but you can even save if you buy images as you need them choosing from some good online service, such as veer.com. When you finally find something usable, is possible that we must introduce a series of changes:

Resizing.

If we must scale the image, in vectorial format it’s simplicity itself. It will be enough to select the object with the cursor and with the selection box (the black squares that surround it) we can change its horizontal, vertical size —throwing of the edges or to scale it proportionally— pulling from those black squares.

Modifying the colours

Another easy operation. You might want to change the colours of the image because the colours are inadequate, or simply the image is in black and white. In order to harmonize the colours with the rest of the design, we can change colours of the image partly or completely. We must take care if the object is a compound of several parts: before changing the respective colors we will have to ungroup the image, an option that normally is in the menu Organize|Ungroup, or from in the contextual menu that appears when pressing with the right button with the object selected. In some programs an object within a group can also be selected, normally pressing the Ctrl key at the same time that you click on the part of the group you wish to select.

Modifying groups

Another frequent modification is to group different pieces of clipart, or eliminate non wanted parts. The objects can be reordered in the way that we wish, as if we worked with acetate transparent sheets, each containing one of these parts.

Which kind of images does the clipart include?

Almost anything, really. Perhaps the examples used here suggest that most clipart images are caricaturesque... but you find any kind of usable images: maps, characters and pictures, anatomy, animals, food, signage elements, furniture... everything. With regards to the accomplishment of the drawings, the spectrum is also wide: from geometric forms and simple symbols to detailed realistic images. For each project we can choose what is more appropriate.

Where do we get the clipart images?

Let us take a look to the CD-ROMs that come with our the programs boxes, because they usually bundle some more or less generous collection of graphics, three-dimensional objects, textures... (with Office, WordPerfect, CorelDraw, Webster...) Possibly the champion of this contest is CorelDraw, because traditionally, at least from version 3 onwards (and already it’s in the 12th version now) Corel includes one or two discs of clipart, thematically classified. Alternatively, numerous web services which sell clipart online exist, and some free download sites. Evidently, the same quality in both categories must not be expected! Our stock illustration is offered in the Typephases website.

Using dingbats.

Dingbats or pictorial typefaces are otherwise normal font files (Truetype, OpenType or Type 1), with one particularitity: instead of having alphabetical or numerical characters assigned to the keyboard slots, they contain drawings in black and white (or in the color you select in the program where you type them, but they are always initially monochrome.) These drawings are used like a any other font: their attributes, as any text’s, can be modified (size, leading, alignment...) or, for more advanced treatment, can be turned into shapes (vectorial) and freely manipulated. The thematic range of dingbats so is varied as one can imagine, covering all the graphical necessities. We found streamlined figurative material, symbols, signs, geometric forms realistic illustration, photo-based pictures... some have a very limited application, others a more general one. There are dingbats that serve especially to create patterns with tiled, mosaic-like pieces.

Which advantage do the dingbats offer in comparison to clipart? Especially, the fact that using dingbats you don’t need a specific program. They can be be used in any Windows or Mac program, and without version issues. The principal constraint they have is being, as we said, monochrome, but they can be coloured very easily.

The applications of dingbats are many: they are a fast source of icons or small graphics to emphasize part of a page without being complicated to edit. They are ideal as starting point for the design of logos. They can be used to construct simple images or be combined for more complex projects. You can transform easily to work with them in an 3D application. See here a few examples, made in a extremely simple, fast and powerful program: Xara 3D (a program which we found as a gift with a computer magazine recently.) This sort of wood toys has been created in less than a minute. We will find freeware or shareware dingbats in many Internet pages. In order to save time, we recommended to visit the excellent The Dingbat Page. Dozens of dingbats free, classified by subject. Another resource: dafont, category dingbats. Then take a look at the designers archives at Typoasis. And, of course, our own dingbats at Typephases.