As a professional website builder, you should know the importance of photo clip art. Clip arts help create illustrations and backgrounds, giving customers a positive first impression. But getting the perfect clip art is a different story altogether. You might need to hire a quality photographer, who may set you back good money. But thankfully, you can download royalty-free clipart from hundreds of websites if you don’t have the time or money to hire a photographer. So, in this article, we want to discuss the best websites to get high-quality copyright-free clipart. But first, let’s discuss what clipart is.
Part 1: What is Clip Art?
Clip art might sound alien to you if you’re still new to photography and website building. Well, clipart or clip art is simply a graphic image made using pre-made photos. Typically, clipart is used for illustrations on printed or electronic media. Besides websites, you can also find clip art on infographics, mobile applications, trademarks, logos, and more.
But why use clip art instead of traditional photos on your website? The thing is that clip arts look more cartoonish. This gives them a more universal feel on whatever website you’re working on. In addition, clip art will seamlessly fit inside your texts because they don’t have rigid triangular frames like stock photos. Of course, this can make your page more interesting.
In the meantime, clip art can come in numerous file formats but is divided into two categories. They include:
Vector graphics: Vector graphics are images generated directly from geometrical shapes. Because of this, vector graphics give more explicit clip art than traditional photos. In fact, vector illustrations can be printed or processed at the highest resolution without losing the original quality. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is the most used vector graphic format on HTML5 browsers like Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera.
Bitmap: Bitmap is a raster image for creating website designs. BMP images provide smooth color transitions with a wide array of shades. Just think of it as a mosaic which uses a close set of materials or stone. However, bitmaps have limited resolution quality, leading to blurry or grainy results after printing. The most common bitmap formats you can use on your website project include JPG, PNG, GIF, and WebP.
It is also worth noting that clip art images are governed by usage or copyright acts. The most common rights include royalty-free, rights managed, and public domain clip art. So, in this guidepost, we’ll focus on where to get a public domain and royalty-free clip arts, which are available to use without paying licensing fees.
Title: In 2024, How to Utilize Legal, Free Clip-Art Resources