[Clipart] Project Ideas

[Alan Horkan]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Jonathan Phillips wrote:

> Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:58:21 -0800
> From: Jonathan Phillips <jon at protofunk.org>
> To: Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com>
> Cc: clipart-list <clipart at freedesktop.org>
> Subject: Re: Encouraging Coporate contributors?  [was Re: [Clipart]
>     Contributors and moderation]
>
> I like the idea of having an initial clipart project drive to kick the
> project off and to give it a name. I agree with you Bryce that it should
> be something specific along the lines of the flag project which will
> draw many people into and raise awareness of the project.
>
> KICKOFF PROJECT IDEAS: street signs, public symbols, universal icons,
> posters, charts, (man flags are a good universal symbol that can be
> easily generated copyright free), plants, animals, buildings,
> skyscrapers, cars, logos, my brain is fried...more?
>
> another thing...are we considering fonts, or svg fonts, as part of the
> project. Man, OSS font collections would be another good project for
> someone (us in the future?) to setup.

Plenty of those ideas are very good.

I noticed recently that Kivio (like Visio) has some map shapes and I
expect it should be possible to get public domain maps from somewhere
(most likely America, given how the government makes so much data public)
and vectorize them although I'm not absolutely sure how useful map clipart
would be certainly no one would want to see their country excluded.
(While I'm thinking about Diagramming software I would point out SmartDraw
http://smartdraw.com/ which although proprietary has extensive collections
of clipart which might provide some inspiration).

The things I see clipart used for most often is small ad's, househunting,
computer for sale, bike for sale, party/celebration, and so on.  (I
doodled something that looked like presents and baloons but it wasn't very
good).  Almost all of these are done using some part of Microsoft Office.

Which makes me wonder about projects like OOExtras (they seem to be usign
the LGPL).  I like the 'blue man' clipart and it would be great if we
could find a way to cooperate with OOExtras.
http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/

Tieing in with OpenOffice seems like a way to get good exposure for any
clipart collection but until they add SVG Import we are at a disadvantage.
If you have not already done so I encourage you to look at the following
bug report which asks for SVG import in OpenOffice and perhaps add your
coomments and perhaps vote for it (i just added 2 votes to it).
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2497

Could anyone explain how this project (freedesktop.org clipart) fits in
with the Sodipodi Clipart if at all?

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

PS sorry for my inability to stick to one coherent idea, hopefully my
brainstorming/thinking out loud will be useful and I'll try not to get
carrried away.