Clipart: a history

Clipart will always have a place in my heart. I'm about to sound like an old fogie, but I have to explain. Back when I was a munchkin of probably 6 or 7 (already glued to the family Macintosh) I liked to design little projects using Clarisworks. This was pre-KidPix and circa Photoshop 3. Basically, Clarisworks let you combine text with images and that's about it. Without a scanner or Google image search (or Google for that matter), I was left with a single CD-ROM of clipart images. Terrible terrible clipart. Knowing the Millslagles, I'm going to assume it was the cheapest clipart package on the market.

The CD-ROM came with a booklet of all the images that you could thumb through to find the clipart that you wanted to use. I remember sitting on the floor of my dad's office with this book, tucking little scraps of paper in between pages to mark what images I wanted to use. (To clarify, my dad's "office" was really the storage room connected to my sister's room that we affectionately called Christmas Town. Aside from housing our trusty family computer, it also housed holiday decorations.)

So I had this clipart book stuffed full of bookmarks that I'd use in my rudimentary documents which had text along the lines of "LAUREN'S ROOM. KEEP OUT!!!" with a regal looking lion head below.  When I ran out of signs to make, AKA I was told to stop wasting printer ink, I would get a paper and pencil and draw from the clipart book. Again, keep in mind that this clipart was just the cheesiest, most poorly rendered and random group of images one could put together. Eventually, we got a scanner and the Internet started to evolve so I retired the clipart book before it could really damage my artistic aesthetic (thank god).

Fast forward 17 years (god, I am old) and I just made my first batch of clipart. I just started working as a graphic designer for the Carlsbad library and one of my main projects is the children's calendar. Every month there's a theme (August is Beachy) and normally the calendar is populated with dingbat images. However, now that you know my story, it's pretty obvious why I requested to make the clipart myself. Above is the result.