Clip art

Since its inception, clip art has evolved to include a wide variety of content, file formats, illustration styles, and licensing restrictions.

After the addition of text and art created through phototypesetting or dry-transfer lettering, the finished, camera-ready pages (called mechanicals) were sent to print.

After the introduction of mass-produced personal computers such as the IBM PC in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the widespread use of clip art by consumers became possible through the invention of desktop publishing.

After 1986, desktop publishing generated a widespread need for pre-made, electronic images as consumers began to produce newsletters and brochures using their own computers.

With the introduction of the Apple Macintosh program MacPaint, consumers were provided the ability to edit and use bit-mapped clip art for the first time.

Beginning in 1984, T/Maker took advantage of the capability of the Macintosh to provide bit-mapped graphics in black and white; by publishing small, retail collections of these images under the brand name "ClickArt".

The illustrators who created the first "serious" clip art for business/organizational (professional) use were Mike Mathis, Joan Shogren, and Dennis Fregger; published by T/Maker in 1984 as "ClickArt Publications".

In 1986, the first vector-based clip art disc was released by Composite, a small desktop publishing company based in Eureka, California.

In 1996, Zedcor (later rebranded to ArtToday, Inc. and then Clipart.com) was the first company to offer clip art images, illustrations, and photos for download as part of an online subscription.

Also during this period, word processing companies, including Microsoft, began offering clip art as a built-in feature of their products.

Between 1998 and 2001, T/Maker's clip art assets were sold each year as a result of some of the largest mergers and acquisitions in the computer software industry, including those of The Learning Company (in 1998) and Mattel (in 1999).

The delivery medium of a clip art product varies from different types of traditionally boxed retail packages to online download sites.

Clip art is sold via both traditional and web-based retail channels (as with Nova Development products), as well as via online, searchable libraries (as with Clipart.com).

Bitmap (or "rasterized") file formats are used to describe rectangular images made up of a grid of colored or grayscale pixels.

Most clip art is provided in a low resolution, bitmap file format which is unsuitable for scaling, transparent backgrounds, or good-quality printed materials.

The World Wide Web Consortium has developed a new, XML-based vector file format called SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and all major modern web browsers - including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari have at least some degree of support for SVG and can render the markup directly.

Most commercial clip art is sold with a limited royalty free license which allows customers to use the image for most personal, educational and non-profit applications.

However this type of image rights has seen a steep decline in the past 20 years as royalty free licenses have become the preferred model for clip art.

In fact, the US Supreme Court in Feist v. Rural ruled that the difficulty of labor and expenses must be rejected as considerations in copyrightability.

[citation needed] Creative Commons licenses is the forefront of the copyleft movement or a new form of free digital clipart and photo image distribution.

For vector art, the open source community established Openclipart in 2004 as a clearinghouse for images which are legitimately donated to the public domain by their copyright owners.