People like to think of art in
a hierarchy, a tier list if you will, with high art, the stuff of
galleries, opera houses and elite institutions at the top, and low
art such as TV shows, video games and comic books at the bottom. At the very lowest rung you'd find
advertising, commercial art and least worthy of all, clip art. Clip art was a collection of ready-made
graphics that could easily be added to documents and presentations. For decades it was ubiquitous,
but it had a reputation for being cheap and corny. As we approach the 10 year
anniversary of Microsoft abandoning clip art, maybe it's time we
gave it a bit more consideration. High art may be considered the
pinnacle of cultural achievement, but it's low art that has a
lot more to tell us about the visual culture of everyday life. In this video we'll dive into
the rise and fall of clip art, and how it was shaped by not only
changing taste, but also technical innovations and constraints over time. We'll take a look at four major shifts
in technology that shaped digital clip art, from its emergence in the
1980s to its retirement in the 2010s. But before we get into that, let's
briefly touch on the analogue precursor to clip art as we know it. The concept of clip art predates
desktop computing, but the audience for it was much more specific. In 1949, former journalist Harry Volk
began selling pre-made illustrations in small, eight-page booklets. He called these “Clip books of line
art”, later shortened to “clip art”. These booklets were extremely
popular in publishing during the era of paste-up in graphic design. You could easily clip out illustrations
with scissors and paste them into a magazine or advertising layout,
saving time and cost compared with commissioning a unique illustration. The style of the clip art shifted
from the 50s into the 1960s and 1970s, but the technical
execution was always excellent. Volk wasn't the only company
offering this service, but in the publishing world, the term cuts
was more commonly used to describe ready-made illustrations than clip art. There was also some overlap with
what were known as mat services. If you ran a small regional
newspaper, you would be reliant on advertising, but local businesses
were unlikely to be able to afford an advertising agency. A mat service would offer ready-made
ad layouts, including illustrations, which you could simply customise
with the business name and small tweaks to the copywriting. These services were the precursors
to the drag-and-drop design templates that we're so familiar with today. Print publishing was big business. Before the ubiquity of screens
and the internet, the newspaper industry was the best way to find
out current information, and so it sustained a huge range of other
industries, including commercial art. So it made sense that it was one of
the first major markets for clip art. But before we dive into the transition
to the personal computer, I want to take a moment to thank this
video's sponsor, Envato Elements. In the 1950s, you could get Volk
clip books by monthly subscription, but a subscription with Envato
Elements will get you so much more than just illustrations. With a library over 11 million
creative assets and growing, Envato Elements has everything you could
need to bring your designs to life. Beyond just stock illustrations
and photos, they also have video clips and templates, music and
sound effects, graphics, layouts, fonts, brushes and more, all for a
single, low monthly cost, totally royalty-free, with unlimited downloads. I've been a user of Elements for both
my videos and as a designer long before they offered to sponsor this channel. And I think what makes Envato
unique is the breadth and diversity of their library. No matter what style or format I need
for a particular project, I can always find something to incorporate in my
design, saving valuable time, or to give me a spark of inspiration for
my look and feel, be it for a social post, motion graphics for a video,
or a complete presentation deck. Plus, the unlimited downloads mean
I know my budget will stay under control, and the fact they're B Corp
certified is a definite added bonus. So if you want to up your design
game or are looking for high quality assets for your next creative project,
definitely check out Envato Elements. Big thanks to Envato Elements
for supporting this channel. From here, the history of
clip art in many ways is the history of desktop computers. Which presents a challenge for me,
since I hear there's another Linus on YouTube talking about tech? There are a lot of details
and history here, so I don't want to get lost in the weeds. Instead of a fine-grained tech
history, I want to take a more lo-fi approach by only zooming in
on a small set of innovations and focusing on the tech as tools. Tools that changed how people
made, sold and used clip art, and how that changed over time. In 1984, Apple released
the original Macintosh. There's a great retrospective over
on the MKBHD channel if you want a deep dive into that history. The important part for us here
is that the Mac was a huge step forward in usability compared
to earlier home computers. The mouse and graphic user interface
made it easy for regular people who had maybe never used a computer before to
pick up and learn in a couple of days. On this desk, we also find a key
piece of hardware, a graphics tablet, which is something
digital artists use to this day. Of course, now we have a lot of
advanced features like pressure and tilt sensitivity, but even
these early models were a huge improvement on the mouse for artists
moving from traditional media. On the software side, we have MacPaint. Despite the Macintosh only displaying
black and white pixels, this digital painting software laid the foundation
for modern raster graphics programs. It included many interface
conventions which are now universal, like the marching ants effect
to indicate a selection, and the lasso and paint bucket tool. Despite none of this being the
first of its kind, it was the first holistic package which let artists
who might not have been tech geeks create art directly on a computer. Also, the popularity of the Macintosh
platform, especially in publishing and education, meant there was a
viable market for clip art that people could use in lesson plans,
business reports, and in presentations using early software like HyperCard. Contrast this with the failed pioneer
from 1983, the VCN ExecuVision, which despite having 8-bit colour,
sold so poorly that even though archivists have all of the separate
$90-a-pop clip art floppies, no copies of the original PC software
remain that can open up those files. This early bitmap clip art from
the Mac has a unique aesthetic. Monochrome and low resolution as
it is, it's brimming with energy and more than a touch of whimsy. This was a new age of technology
and you can sense that excitement come through, even when the
subject matter was mundane. A defining feature was the use of
dithering, a technique using patterns of pixels to simulate shades of grey
to get around that binary colour limit. It all has a rustic charm to it,
especially the portraits, which are fantastically imperfect. It's obvious these are
illustrations and not photos. So they look a bit wonky, but
that's what gives them character. It's a fascinating snapshot into
how creative minds were figuring out how to use these new tools. And this pioneering digital art
was only created, and thus survives for us to see today, because of
the commercial nature of clip art. Okay, you might be thinking, that's
cool, but if computers only had one colour, then where did all these
1980s motion graphics come from? These days we tend to think of video
as something you do with a computer, but that hasn't always been the
case, and in the 1980s, film and television graphics were light years
ahead of what home computers could do, thanks to industrial graphics
workstations like the Quantel Paintbox. These were capable of 24-bit
colour graphics, and came to define the look of MTV amongst
other pop culture touchstones. Good luck getting your hands on one
though, the Macintosh launched at under £2000 in the UK, whereas the
Quantel Paintbox cost around £80,000, equivalent to a brand new Rolls Royce,
or around 2.5 times the average cost of a house in Britain at the time. Skip forward to the end of the 80s,
and we reach another turning point. Pixel art was fantastic, but it was
still time consuming to produce. An alternative would be to start
with traditional media, and somehow get it into the computer. While fax machines that scanned
documents had been around for some time, they were never designed with the
resolution and form factor for artwork. You couldn't exactly stick a painting
through a fax machine, and even if you did, it would look like garbage. Flatbed scanners fixed this problem. The early models might set you back
several thousand dollars, but after a few years a basic greyscale model like
this had become much more affordable. The second problem was that
the computers were just not that powerful yet, and high
resolution bitmaps were slow to load and ate up limited storage. The breakthrough was to convert bitmaps
into vector graphics, which instead of containing data for every pixel in an
image, just contained the mathematical instructions on how to draw the
lines and shapes to compose it. Think of the difference in postage
costs between mailing a wedding cake and mailing the written recipe. The approach doesn't work well for
photos, but is perfect for stuff like logos and illustrations. The other big plus of vectors is
scalability, meaning that they could be blown up or printed in
high definition without pixelation. Adobe's PostScript language
helped computers and printers both interpret the same instructions
when it came to vector graphics, and was the catalyst for the birth
of the desktop publishing industry. But that still doesn't solve how
to go from scanned image to vector. While vector drawing software
came shortly on the heels of bitmap programs like MacPaint,
the process of manually tracing could be equally time consuming. Auto trace, or vectorisation
technology, was first used by architects and cartographers for
floor plans and maps, since the input was all line drawings anyway,
it was a natural starting point. It wasn't until the late 80s that
vector graphics software started adopting the feature, but when
they did, it seemed magical. The workflow of going from paper to
scanner to vector became a major part of the clip art industry, which entered
a gold rush as the 90s approached. Desktop publishing had rapidly
gained traction and created a huge market for digital clip art. This period was challenging though
for clip art users, since there were loads of companies with
different prices, quality levels, file formats, and collections that
didn't all cover the same topics. And without the internet,
it was difficult to get that information in a single place. This led to different buyer's
guides for clip art, which could cost you over $130 before
even purchasing a single image. The styles varied widely from one
company to the next, but I do want to zoom in on a particular case
study from a few years later, which I believe could only have emerged
during the clip art golden age. The nineties was weird. Aesthetically, there were a lot of
different influences going on, so there was also a lot of wiggle room
for eccentric and even grotesque styles to break into the mainstream. In clip art, the best example
of this is the massive success of Art Parts by Ron and Joe. If you remember the 90s and
early 2000s, you might not have heard the name, but you've
definitely seen this clip art. Until I did this deep dive, I
had assumed this was some kind of printmaking technique, but
that didn't entirely make sense. Printmaking is way too time
consuming if you're only going to scan a single copy. It turns out it was scratchboard art,
a technique that involves scratching marks onto a board with a dark
coating to reveal white underneath. Though clearly there was some
strong influence from German expressionist printmakers. Idiosyncratic looks aside, it
was the ideal art style for the technology of the time. Autotrace may have seemed like
magic, but it was far from perfect. Luckily for illustrator Joe Crabtree,
perfection wasn't a concern. The art itself is extremely
Gen X, knowingly quirky with a postmodern, ironic sense of humour. For Ron and Joe, it seems the
stars of the right style, at the right time, with the right
technology, aligned perfectly to create an unlikely mainstream hit. The Macintosh originally had a
significant advantage over other PCs with its intuitive interface, but it
was Microsoft who brought mouse-based computing to the masses with Windows
3.1, later building on that success with Windows 95, the first mainstream
operating system to ship on CD-ROM. Today we're surrounded
by huge amounts of data. A phone with only 2GB of storage
is basically e-waste, so it can be hard to appreciate the sheer
leap that CD-ROM technology was. A single CD could hold almost as
much data as 500 floppy disks, with a capacity that often dwarfed hard
drive sizes of early 90s computers. This gave rise to the buzzword,
multi-media PC, and completely revolutionised software in
desktop publishing and education. Extensive libraries of clip art just
weren't practical on floppies, in terms of both usability and economics. The CD-ROM allowed users to browse
thousands of images easily without constantly switching disks or
referencing printed catalogues. At least that was the promise, because
the CD-ROM unleashed an all-out clip art war of ever-inflating collections
and bigger and bigger numbers. By this point, desktop publishing
was so mainstream that even amateurs were getting in on the action,
printing their own newsletters and greeting cards at home. With a growing user base and
competition heating up, how do you stand out from the crowd? Well for the Corel Corporation,
the answer was bundling. Why purchase expensive image
editing, vector graphics and page layout software, clip art and
font separately when you could buy everything in one convenient package? CorelDRAW was an early mover with very
capable graphics software for Windows. Aggressive pricing, frequent, if
buggy, releases and ever-inflating clip art numbers in marketing helped
them to maintain market share. Corel certainly weren't the only
ones in this arms race, but they were certainly one of the most successful. But that success came at a price. Clip art's image took severe damage
during the clip art wars, as did Corel's reputation amongst design
and publishing professionals. In the early days of Autotrace,
sellers at least had the courtesy to clean up and polish the results. But when offering collections of
50,000 images, quality control was a luxury they could no longer afford. The rapid inflation also led to
collections being padded out with decorative alphabets and simple
cartoonish styles over more detailed artwork and useful categories of
images, giving clip art a reputation for being kitsch and cheesy. The high tech appeal of CD-ROMs
quickly evaporated as people's mailboxes became flooded with free
AOL trial CDs in the late 2000s. With so much competition at
the bottom end of the market, clip art became dime a dozen. Cheap, low quality shovelware. You could easily find thousands
of images of clip art bundled with other shareware and digital
filler given away for free on the front of computer magazines. The days when a single floppy disk of
clip art cost 50 bucks were long gone. But this fall from grace also
opened up new opportunities. Clip art was now in the hands of
everyday people, students, office workers, and others who found
creative ways to use it beyond the realm of desktop publishing. Sure, it was still a
usability nightmare. CDs solved the storage problem,
but didn't fix underlying issues like incompatible file formats
and the hassle of browsing through weird standalone applications. Yet something was on the horizon
that would change people's experience of clip art in a major way. PowerPoint has a complex origin story. It was developed in the 80s
with funding from Apple before being scooped up by Microsoft. But it wasn't until the late
90s that it really took off and became a phenomenon. By 1992, it was the best selling
presentation software on any platform. It became so ubiquitous to
even become a genericised term like Kleenex or Hoover. But the real game changer for
PowerPoint was the introduction of digital projectors, which
were very much the Mentos to PowerPoint's Diet Coke. Before computers, presentations
were made using film slides, hence slideshows, or overhead projectors. Slides were definitely more
polished, but producing them was slow and expensive. You had to go to a specialised
bureau to have them made. Overhead projectors were a
simpler option, needing only transparencies that could be
drawn on directly or later used with a photocopier or printer. However, because of their limited
range, they were only really good for small groups, like in a classroom. When digital projectors came on
the scene, it was a game changer. Suddenly presentations could
be made anywhere, anytime. And with laptops getting lighter and
more portable, it was possible to make tweaks up until the last minute, even
when you were away from the office. This revolutionised not only
sales presentations, but also those in education. And with that came a huge
demand for visual support. Sure, people were already using
third party clip art, but Microsoft's decision to include it in the
Office suite made it way more accessible and user-friendly,
being only a drop-down menu away. In the late 1990s, Microsoft
was riding high and had the cash to commission original clip
art for the Office collection. One artist who worked for them said the
rate was $100 per image, earning them $10,000 for a commission of 100 images. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly,
but on the other hand, there were no royalties over time, meaning
the original artist never gets paid after the initial commission. The standard of Microsoft's
clip art library was top-notch. Sure, some collections weren't
as polished as others, but Microsoft still did a great job
in providing a wide range of art styles and covering a diverse set
of different topics and scenarios. With Office being productivity
software, the collection of business and office culture images was
especially remarkable, offering a fascinating snapshot of office
life at the turn of the millennium. The folks who used this
clip art weren't just office workers and students. It was virtually everybody. So for many Gen Xers and Millennials,
a lot of these pieces of clip art can be powerfully nostalgic,
which is an odd thing to say about something so banal and anonymous. Many of the sets and collections
share a common style, some clearly inspired by historic movements
in illustration, art and design. But apart from a select few who've
talked about it in public interviews, we don't know who created this art. This might be due to a non-disclosure
agreement from Microsoft, or perhaps there was an element
of professional embarrassment. For Generation X, who were at the core
of 90s culture, there was a huge taboo against being branded “a sellout”,
especially when it came to art. Even so, Microsoft were hardly
the first to tempt artists into the dirty world of commerce. Since at least the Volk clip
books of the 1950s, comic book artists and illustrators would
draw clip art as a way to make a bit of extra cash on the side. Sadly for these unnamed artists,
good times don't last forever. And in 2014, following years
of neglect, Microsoft removed clip art from the Office suite. Many articles declaring it
to be the death of clip art, marking the end of an era. By the early 2010s, broadband became
more accessible and the availability of cheap and good digital SLR
cameras unleashed a tsunami of amateur digital photographers. This led to a massive disruption of
the stock photo industry, which had traditionally been very expensive and
the sole domain of major companies who could afford the high prices. Sites like iStockphoto began
the trend of microstock, which offered images crowdsourced from
photographers around the world for much cheaper prices, or even free. After being so overused, people
were ready for a change from clip art, but stock photos were
also more up-to-date, easier to search and covered more scenarios. While stock photography became the
default, not every concept can be photographed, especially as more things
became digital and thus intangible. Stock photos of server racks, hard
drives and actual clouds are neither visually compelling nor very helpful. It's little wonder then that
tech companies were amongst the first to re-embrace illustration. In 2017, Facebook launched a new
illustration style called Alegria. It was characterised by bright colours,
simple geometric forms and human figures with exaggerated proportions
and non-representational skin tones. This was meant to project a friendly
and inclusive image, but regardless of whether it helped Facebook's
reputation, the illustration style was extremely popular and endlessly
copied, mostly by other tech companies. As it grew in popularity, people
began to call it “Corporate Memphis” or simply the Corporate Art Style. Stock illustrators found it
easy to produce and sell. It became a go-to for many
companies who could never afford custom illustration. It was also easy to manipulate and
customize for designers who lacked drawing skills compared with more
detailed and realistic styles. This raises some interesting questions. For one, is clip art actually dead or
does it just go by a different name? In the newspaper era, it
was called cuts and now it's called stock illustration. The tools and distribution methods
may have changed, but the basic concept is the same – ready-made
illustrations for commercial use. There's also been a growing
backlash against the Corporate Memphis style, with many critics
calling it soulless trash. But do people actually hate this art,
or just the companies it represents? As philosopher Slavoj Zizek said,
“You don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.” If big tech
companies had adopted a different style, would it still provoke
the same vitriol in people? Another question to consider is whether
it's fair to judge what is essentially clip art by the standards of fine art. Just because they're both visual
expressions doesn't mean they're intended for the same purpose. Clip art has a very specific commercial
purpose – to amplify a message, regardless of the value of that
message, whether it's an anti-littering campaign, a Black Friday sale, or a
pitch for crypto-enabled smart toilets. We don't experience it like fine art. It's not meant to evoke
personal emotions or comment on the human experience. So then, can art without
a soul still have value? I believe that yes, it can. Commercial art reflects our society
in a different, more collective way, both the good and the bad. In a capitalist society, of
course it reflects our consumer aspirations, but also our
unconscious attitudes and values. Take for example the hand-drawn
commercial illustrations of mid-century advertising. Visually gorgeous and technically
flawless, but they were also often filled with sexist and racist tropes. As for today's corporate Memphis
style, the latest iteration of clip art, who knows what people with
the benefit of hindsight will see reflected about our moment in history? An age of tech giants projecting
a colourful, friendly image, while also exploiting people and
profiting off our social division and environmental destruction? Probably. But also an age when people felt
alienated by technology that was supposed to bring us together. But still, we yearned for
an authentic connection. That's not a unique vision of a
lone artist, but a shared experience felt by all of us, and expressed
even in the lowest form of art. And in that way, it's kind of
remarkable what can be gleaned by digging through the trash. That's it for my deep dive
into the rise and fall, and rise again, of clip art. A special thanks to my patrons
over on Patreon who support me to continue making videos like this. You can join them for as little
as a dollar a month, and it really makes a huge difference
in keeping this channel going. If that ending was a little bit
too heavy for you, I suggest you check out this video. It's one of the least watched on the
channel, but I think it's a lot of fun where I redesign a whiskey label from a
popular Japanese video game franchise. My name is Linus, thank you
for watching and I hope I'll see you in a future video.
