[Clipart] what is clipart?

[Frederik Elwert]

Am Montag, den 17.09.2007, 15:46 +0300 schrieb Nicu Buculei:
> I think I see your point, we very often tend to focus on images which 
> look cool instead of images which are good as clipart, as the purpose of 
> clipart is not to look good by itself, but to be an useful building 
> block for larger works.

That brings me to a point that I have thought about a while: Most
clipart libraries, commercial and free, suffer from a big problem in
this regard - the variety of style. So imagine you want to make a
birthday invitation and put a cake with candles on it, as well as a
bottle of champagne. Chances are quite big that both are completely
different in style and so your invitation somehow has this typical "I
made it with clipart" look.

It's really hard to work around this, as

a) artists have different styles, and that's good, and we don't want to
   exclude any piece for this reason
b) a single artist will hardly cover a huge range of topics, nor stick 
   to the same style for him/herself.

But in the end, we have that cluttering.

So I thought about setting up some style guides that could make up a set
of quite coherent collections. The first step would be to define a set
of styles. Something as the Tango style guidelines would be nice, but
for a variety of clipart styles, e.g.,
      * Photo-realistic with gradients, blur, smooth colors
      * old-fashioned clipart style, with wide black borders and no
        gradients
      * Black-and-white traces (we have a lot of that)
      * etc.

Then tags for these styles could be added to clipart following the
guidelines. It would be no necessity to stick to these styles, anyone
could upload his/her individual clipart as before. But if somebody wants
to contribute to a style collection, he/she could stick to the
guidelines. For beginners it might even be easier to have a guideline to
stick to then to start all by themselves.

If the packaging/download/etc stuff will be back in the future, one
could easily package clipart for the styles and then provide coherent
collections.

Cheers,
Frederik