Clip Art: you might be gone – but your happy floppy disks will never be forgotten
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Version 0 of 1. The execution was as workmanlike as it was sudden. “The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop,” a Microsoft Office blog declared on Monday. In an offensively hamfisted stab at consolation, the post continued: “Customers ... still have the ability to add images to their documents using Bing Image Search.” A fat lot of good that’ll do. Does Bing Image Search have a cartoon of a cork popping out of a bottle? Does it have a stickman in a top hat staring bewildered into a mirror? Does it, for the love of all that’s holy, have a picture of a wizard looking through a telescope? Does it? Because if not then I don’t want to know. I, like everyone else in my generation, grew up with Clip Art. The first Clip Art library was produced in 1983, so I can’t remember a time before it. I spent entire IT classes at my school haphazardly overstuffing Word documents with clumsily resized birthday cakes, clocks and disembodied bridges. Would that have been possible without Clip Art? Hardly. The story of ClipArt is the story of technology itself. Originally an old printing term, Clip Art came into its own with the arrival of desktop publishing. Simplistic bitmap files soon gave way to more sophisticated vector-based images that opened up thousands of sentiments that couldn’t previously be expressed with computer art. In the late 1990s, Clip Art was a titan. For a while you could see its footprints everywhere. The opening titles to Nigella Lawson’s debut TV series. The murals that line the platform of Shadwell Overground station in London. You could even argue that the scribbly lettering of the Friends logo owed a debt to the Clip aesthetic. It looked unstoppable. But then came the internet, ready to do for Clip Art what it had already done for the album and print journalism. Without any thought for the struggling artists already barely eking out a living crafting arbitrary abstract digital pictures – of happy floppy disks, or businesswomen pushing giant egg-timers filled with money – people stopped paying for their Clip Art. Instead, they turned online, thinking that a free and unattributed photo from Google Images would capture the essence of a situation in the same way that, say, a brightly coloured picture of envelopes tumbling out of a computer screen would. It wouldn’t, of course. ClipArt died because we neglected it. Our heads were turned by the shiny new treats offered by Gifs and Vines and emojis, and we forgot about our trusty old pal. Well, you might be gone, but you’re certainly not forgotten. Whenever I see a jaunty black and white cake, I’ll think of you. Whenever I see a happy floppy disk with arms and legs and a mouth, I’ll think of you. Whenever piles of envelopes suddenly start pouring from my computer screen like something from The Ring then, God help me, Clip Art, I will think of you. And I will be grateful for the memories. |