Also, you'll
find that office supply stores such as Staples,
Office Depot or Office Max also sell huge collections of clip art.Clip Art for
Your Web Site
FREE CLIP ART & PHOTOS
- TIPS & HINTS
Clip art, like animation or music, can spice up your website but you need to be careful not to overdo it. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of web sites that offer free clip art. Be forewarned, though - most of what is available is very amateurish and/or cartoon-like in appearance. That may be fine if it matches the "personality" of your website, but if you want a more professional look, such as for a business, you may want to forego clip art in favor of actual photographs. There are also some websites offering free photos, as well as CDs you can buy for as little as $10 that have extensive photo collections.
FREE & OTHER CLIP ART & PHOTO SOURCES
With that said, here are some useful tips and free resources:
go to google.com and type this in the search window: "free clip art" (about 1.75 million returns) - to narrow your search, add a single word or phrase (in quotes) describing the specific type of art you're seeking, e.g. mechanic, plane, space, etc. - use the singular, not the plural)
for photos, type in "free photos" (about 2.42 million returns) - to narrow your search, add a single word or phrase (in quotes) describing the specific type of photo you're seeking, e.g. mechanic, plane, space, etc. - use the singular, not the plural)
Sites offering "royalty-free" clip art or photos do not offer these for free - and sometimes they charge outrageously high fees, up to $150 per photo!!!! That's for one-time use. So unless you absolutely have to have one of these, I recommend avoiding them. "Royalty-free" simply means you pay their fee for "one-time use" then don't have to pay additional royalties - but the initial fee is so high you can usually do better elsewhere.
Start browsing!
Also, you'll
find that office supply stores such as Staples,
Office Depot or Office Max also sell huge collections of clip art.
Nova Art Explosion® 800,000 ($89.99 at Staples) continues this tradition with exclusive vector illustrations, brand new photographs, professionally designed web graphics and more. Its the most complete Windows clip art package Nova has ever released.
Included are 34 CD-ROMs, four CD-ROM portfolios, an 1800-page printed catalog and our exclusive Quick Locator index.
Best of all, Art Explosion 800,000 requires no downloads and no memberships.
What you see is what you get ... and what you get is all inside the box.
Nearly 200,000 of the Finest Scalable Vector Clip Art Images Available
120,000 Color Photos and Backgrounds
32-bit Image Browser Software with Full Color Previews
Popular WMF, TIF, GIF, JPG File Formats
Includes More Than 350,000 Exclusive Graphics
Free Technical Support
Widest Variety of Graphics Available: Classic and Retro Images, Web Graphics, Animations, Technical Symbols and MUCH more..
System requirements: Windows 95, 98, 2000, Me or XP, Pentium 133 Mhz or faster, 32 MB RAM
Other collections are smaller and often much cheaper.
In using either clip art or photos, it is important to remember these tips:
keep your photo size very small
optimize your photo to make it small (this means reducing some of the colors in a good photo program). Check Google.com for freeware or shareware programs capable of doing this.
if you must include a large (slow-loading) photo, create a thumbnail and use it as a link to the larger photo, so your website visitor has the choice to look at the big one or not.
don't put a lot of photos (even small ones) on one page - it takes far too long to download unless your visitor has a cable or DSL connection (only 50% of US internet users do, the rest of us still have to use the much slower telephone line connection)
make sure your photos relate to the topic of your website and don't just take up space to look cute
if your website is selling a service or product, the only reason for including art (or anything else) is to increase your chance of making a sale!