Design Tip 2: Keeping it in the clip art family

by Hamish Long

When we are putting together a multiple page document or presentation we often want to jazz it up with images - we might want to add interest and complement the text. It can be a headache trying to achieve this with clip art. Clip art gets a fairly bad press these days - it's seen as amateurish and old fashioned. This is fair comment in a lot of cases, but we can use it in an eye-catching way if we stick to the same style. For our multiple page document we want to build a "package" and using clip art with the same style creates a familiarity, a look and feel, across the document.

Here are a couple of examples of how a PowerPoint presentation could look:

I think you'll agree that the second one is far more palatable! But how do you go about sourcing a family of images?

1. Head to Microsoft's clip art website
2. Input your search term and click the right-hand tab of the "search" button and select "clip art"
3. When you have found an image you like, click it and see if it has a style number (above the keywords). If it does, click the style number and all the images in that style will be displayed.
4. Put all the images you want in your selection basket for downloading

Don't worry if the images aren't an exact match for your text - they only need to be a nod towards the subject matter - see the above example.