Businesses shut down. Productivity slows to a halt. Shopping malls are so full of people they’re bursting at the seems. These are just some of the ideas brought to mind as the end of the year approaches and a new Holiday Season is upon us.

A source of stress, at times, the Holidays can also be a time of togetherness and unity for people. Clip art images by liftarn (above) and bloodsong (below) beautifully demonstrate how simple and effective imagery can articulate these same feelings.

Vector graphics have also been stylistically implemented by mcol’s Christmas tree in the spirit of the Holiday Season.

The Open Clip Art Library is always evolving and welcomes contributions from everyone around the world.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

Regular internet users know that RSS feeds can significantly reduce time spent finding new content on your favorite web pages.  With this influx of content flooding users’ RSS Readers, content producers must find ways to attract new subscribers and keep them reading.

While valuable content is the surest way to accomplish this, the importance of catching a reader’s eye cannot be ignored.

Raulxav has demonstrated other ideas for RSS icons, and I encourage you to consider ways in which you might catch a reader’s attention.

Visit the Open Clip Art Library to learn how you can contribute.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

Also, Minduka made a nice image of a Present. With Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), since I’m an admin, I’m able to help cleanup Minduka’s file. When he uploaded it, he did not set the document boundary correctly. We hope that all types of people will upload content, so please keep uploading. However, every once and a while special people come to the Open Clip Art Library who want help fix these issues. We call these awesome people, Librarians. If you want to be one, please do join our mailing list and we can show you how.

I fixed the following image, uploaded the file again and then created a thumbnail of his work for this blog post and the OCAL website. Fixed!

Clip Art of the Week is brought to you by Worldlabel.com, a maker of labels for laser and inkjet printing.

Jeronimo is cranking out high quality photo-realistic clip art which is highly usable from everything from T-Shirts, labels, postcards, and compositions. Since the clip art is freely usable, you can use it on your own business card design or website.

Jeronimo just uploaded the above Globe, seemingly inspired by the recent praise for his uploads. There are many globes as well at Open Clip Art Library.

And, my personal favorite work of Jeronimo’s is his Audio Tape, which some of you kind readers might not even remember at all!

As with each Clip Art of the Week, I am most eager to encourage you to contribute to the Open Clip Art Library. Right now, behind the scenes, several people are working on the next version of the website which includes thumbnails, an advanced (but clean) user interface, and an easier process for contributing. If you’d like to help out, please join the discussion!

Other great selections are the vector traced and tweaked, bottle below, and the celtic ornament which is useful for generating cards and letterhead. Also, if you visit Hrum’s artist page you can find more ornaments and borders which anyone may use freely for making cards, or a border for a letter.

And more recently, Hrum is creating photorealistic images like this trashcan.

Regardless, there is much more that Hrum is submitting. Please head over, register at Open Clip Art Library, and leave some reviews on the work that Hrum and others are doing at Open Clip Art Library!

For this week, I want to feature their work on uploading public domain clip arts from the old system such as these AIGA standard images like this heliport:

If your clip art is uploaded as the anonymous user on Open Clip Art Library, please do contact the Anonymous author to get the clipart added to your account on the new Open Clip Art Library engine. For this week, please do applaud all those who are helping upload old cliparts to the anonymous account to help move us towards our goal of 12,000 clip art uploads this month!

UPDATE: As pointed out, praise Papapishu who has contributed so much to these efforts!

When we released Open Clip Art Library 0.19 last week, the amazing importance of getting back on track with monthly releases cannot be undervalued. As such, we hit a goal of 10,000 pieces of clip art uploaded to our new system. For April we are shooting to get 12,000 total pieces. Right now on April 10, we have 10,540 pieces!

And, for the month of April we challenged the community to upload images related to spring. Mokush hit this one on the head with the lovely sunflower. Please use it freely in your compositions, on labels, on stationary and anywhere you see fit.

Please help us as well grow the project to 12,000 pieces, all which will be included in the upcoming 0.20 Open Clip Art Library packaged release, news written about, and publicized at the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal.

Also, this entire last month the Open Clip Art Library celebrated its 5th birthday! We exceeded the 10,000 file upload mark last week and currently have 10147 files uploaded! That is really great news! This has helped encourage old and new developers to the project and made our collective self-esteem much stronger.

To make this even a bigger milestone, new developer, Jochen, created the 0.19 release of clip art. We haven’t released a new package since 2005! In the past our package releases really drove growth of the project and site, and with the rejuvenated project, I’m confident this is already happening.

Please help us spread the good news about this project, link to this post, and keep contributing clip art! From this OCAL10K sprint, I already have loads of excellent new clip art to write about here coming soon.

Here is a linkable press release excerpt as well:

March 31, 2009 – Release 0.19 of Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org), containing over 12,000 high quality scalable vector graphics (SVG) files released into the public domain by over a 1000 artists, is now available for download and use. In celebration of this accomplishment, since OCAL’s last release happened in 2005, and March being 5th anniversary of the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), the OCAL community set a goal to achieve 10,000 uploaded pieces of vector graphics. The project achieved this with the 10,000th submission from user Boobaloo who uploaded a graphic of an onion. The project congratulates Boobaloo for uploading the 10,000th upload. Also, project congratulates all artists who have uploaded in this anniversary OCAL10K sprint.

The project congratulates Nicu who personally crossed the 500 clip art upload barrier and now has 696 pieces of clip art uploaded to the system. All efforts towards the OCAL10K goal helped boost the site’s registrations and focus on releasing monthly packages once more to make this project a flowing river of clip art uploads. Since all contributions to the project are released into the public domain via the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, anyone may use the Open Clip Art Library files for any use including collections, to make money, and to generate compositions. However, the community encourages anyone who uses the clip art to provide attribution back to the original clip art in the form of a link or to announce the use of the clip art in some form.

For the month of April in lead up to the annual Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal, May 5-9, 2009, the Open Clip Art Library is setting a goal to achieve 12,000 pieces of uploaded clip art related to spring time, release the 0.20 package of clip art, and to update the site’s software to ccHost 5. The projects asks all who are software developers comfortable with PHP and MYSQL, to consider joining the project now ti help with three critical tasks of adding rendered thumbnails, update the site software to ccHost 5, and to help roll-out our latest software theme.

Continue onward to read the highlights and to grab the new packages of all of our clip art!

The original is from Wikimedia Commons and released into the public domain.

As we are still striving towards the Open Clip Art Library 10K, taking Papapishu’s approach to adding to the collection is fabulous. We are at 9744 pieces right now with 10 days left! Please help us meet the goal by uploading your clip art!

For this week, I am highlighting the minimal works of Pitr.

One image I really appreciate is of Pitr’s watermelon:

This image is a reworked version of Machovka’s Watermelon:

The point is that Open Clip Art Library allows you to remix other people’s clip art and show the relationship between clip art files uploaded. Towards the Open Clip Art Library 10K during this month’s 5th anniversary of Open Clip Art Library, remixing clip art is a great way to help us meet our goal!