4.22.2008

My Dirty Little Clip Art Habit

Hi. My name is Jane and I use clip art.
[and the Chorus responds...'Hi Jane']

After my previous life of teaching college kids visual literacy and interface design I have very little patience for the visual vomit of gratuitous graphics that plague so many learning and other presentations these days.

I cringe at the sight of 'screen beans'; I roll my eyes anytime I see one of those stock animated .gifs flickering on my screen. It's hard for me to pay attention to the actual content because I find myself so annoyed by the visuals. Generally, it's not the author's fault...I've seen bad clip art happen to otherwise very good people. Personally I blame Microsoft for giving such easy access to such a wealth (and I use that term loosely) of neatly organized, keyword searchable clips into the hands of individuals that innocently wish to make their content more visually compelling. However they are so easily lured into the 'if a little is good, then more must be better' trap. And that can get ugly.

So given this obvious loathing of clip art abuse, it pains me to admit publicly that I actually use it myself quite regularly. You all have Tom Kuhlmann to thank for brokering this admission. His post today on his Rapid eLearning blog provided tips on taking free clip art via Microsoft Office Online and creating custom characters for eLearning scenarios. Already being a fan of Tom's graphic style, this somehow allows me to identify with his stance on using the 'bones' of clip art as the basis for rapidly creating meaningful graphics without the assistance of full blown graphics software.

Most recently, I pilfered the Microsoft clip library for a related series of graphics that I could use as a visual mapping device within our course content slides. After finding a style of simple 3D icon buttons that I liked, I went about adjusting them to work with our visual templates.

First, I wanted to make sure each one related to one another but still was distinctive enough to map as different types of content. Enter 're-coloring'. This is so simple it's silly. Inserting a graphic into PowerPoint 2007, you can format it to take on several different variations of coloring and BONUS; the re-coloring options all are associated with your selected presentation color palette:





Second, I needed to further customize one to serve as the ‘instructor led activity’ button. Not as easy, but I still had a running start by taking another silhouette clip from the library (which was already similar to the other icons) and one of the other buttons into Photoshop and merging them into the exact symbol I needed. WAY faster than starting from scratch:





So yes, there it is...my dirty little secret revealed. Thanks Tom for providing the impetus for me to share with the group.

1 comment:

everdream said...

I'm glad you came clean with this confession. Excellent tip, especially combined with Tom's. Now go say 10 Hail Mary's and all is forgiven! :)