Open Clip Art Library Announces 0.8 Release

jonadab writes "The Open Clip Art Library project (hosted at freedesktop.org) is announcing their first widely-publicized release, dubbed 0.8, containing over two and a half thousand unique vector images (in SVG format), sorted into categories. All of the images are released into the public domain and may be used as royalty-free clipart. You can browse the collection through the web interface or download the entire thing as a gzipped tarball. (Mirrors are welcome.) The library is also always soliciting more contributions, and holiday-themed images would be particularly appropriate this time of year. Thanks to everyone who has contributed artwork to the library already. "

Comments

Re:Cool

[jonadab]

> On a separate note, so typical of open-sourc-y type people to choose some
> snazzy but obscure format to distribute their stuff. Why not gif or png? :(

Thumbnails in PNG format are included for each image, but PNG is a _bitmapped_
format, so it's not appropriate for _vector_ graphics. (Converting a vector
graphic to a bitmapped format is a lossy operation; you can't go back and
change your mind about how big you wanted the image to be. The difference
between PNG and SVG is like the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator.)

The only other widely supported vector formats I know about are WMF,
Illustrator's format, or the source formats for various raytracers. The
latter are mostly obscure (except maybe POV) and require specific software
and usually quite a lot of CPU time to render. They're great for rendering
wickedly cool 3D scenes, but they're not a good format choice for clipart.

WMF or Illustrator formats could have been used, but SVG was chosen because
it is a W3C standard (so _theoretically_ should within a decade or thereabouts
be supported directly by most browsers; there is little chance that WMF or
Illustrator formats will ever be supported by browsers) and also because it
supports embedded metadata for keeping track of the author and stuff.

If someone wants to distribute packages of rendered PNG versions at a larger
size than the thumbnails, that would be acceptable. There are tools that
can automatically batch-render the SVG images to PNGs -- the project uses
such tools to generate the thumbnails. Long-term, we would prefer that
applications develop support for SVG, since it is a W3C standard and also
because the ability to resize images without having them pixelate is very
useful -- and, indeed, many applications have this on their TODO lists and
just haven't gotten around to it yet, or in some cases (such as Mozilla)
haven't got it debugged enough to include in the main releases, although
it's available as an option at compile time -- but packages of pre-rendered
bitmapped graphics would be useful in the short term for use with apps that
do not support SVG right now. However, those would only be just that --
prerendered bitmaps. We still need to keep the SVG source images, because
those are the ones that can be scaled to any resolution and have the metadata.

artistic programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a year on a GUI for aa windows-app. Found myself bean torn apart by programmer to artists all the time as our graphics-artist wasn't officialy hired by the company thus not so commited.

I personaly have a thing for graphics, but let me tell you this. If you state that your skills aren't all that, you're probably wasting tons of time generating this art you're not too pleased with.

So I can give you two advices:

1. either decide that you want to develope this artistic side of yours and then read the rest of the posts for some tutorial/mini-course/etc on graphics.

2. decide that you want to focus on what you like, which is programming so it sounds, and find somebody to outsource your icons/sprites to. You're surely to find some art-school student or kid that would love to do some 'official' work on some 'project' for some $, it shouldn't cost you that much cause you're not paying a studio of god knows what, and you're bound to get better results than what you've scrubbed up until now, according to your statements :-)