[Clipart] what is clipart?

[Jon Phillips]

On Mon, 2007-09-17 at 16:01 +0200, Frederik Elwert wrote:
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> clipart mailing list
> clipart at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/clipart

This is  great idea Frederik...maybe you can recommend some style tags
to use...and lead the pack...there could be season tags, collections,
etc...too...good simple and easy to do :)

Jon

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