The Open Clip Art Library grew from a project between Jon Phillips (of Fabricatorz) and Bryce Harrington, in early 2004. From humble beginnings, it has evolved into a massive collection of over 24,000 scalable vector images, all created by 1200+ artists from around the world.

The Open Clip Art Library is an increasingly useful and powerful platform, through which, all work uploaded to the site is dedicated to the public through Creative Commons’ “Public Domain Dedicated”. Anyone can download and use the entire SVG library for any purpose, including both free and commercial works!

OCAL now boasts an easily navigable collection, made possible by new thumbnail previews. It has now become much easier to search and download clip art that suits any situation. The new site layout includes an updated theme, from Andy Fitzsimon, that emphasizes user interaction by placing more importance on the portal to upload created work, as well as displaying selections from the ever-growing collection.

Behind the scenes, members of Fabricatorz, including, among others, Bassel Safadi, Michi, Ronaldo Barbachano, and Brad Phillips, have helped push The Open Clip Art Library onto the Aiki Framework. This new PHP + MYSQL platform allows programmers to easily create and work with content management systems from the web.

Please help support the new Open Clip Art site launch by registering (if you haven’t already) and uploading artwork of your own!.

Read the entire Announcement 2.0 here and at the Fabricatorz post.

Going back through 2009 submissions will provide a point of reference as we search for these answers.

When used effectively, gradients can add new dimensions to vector-based imagery. The landscape designed by hrum (pictured above) combines multiple gradient layers into an effective piece of art.

Photorealistic techniques became very popular design choices for the Clip Art Community in 2009, and Chrisdesign provided an excellent example with his longsword.

Near the end of the year, placidoaps merged traditional vector graphic lines with tactical uses of gradients to give his rendering of a penguin both character and depth.

The Open Clip Art Library accepts vector art from anyone, anywhere, so help make visual landmarks in 2010 by contributing! Check out other 2009 works by Simanek and klaasvangend to get inspired.

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

As time runs short in this decade and people begin to look toward 2010, images by our Anonymous contributors and Muga help to remind us to look back and celebrate all we’ve been able to accomplish in the last year.

With glasses raised, many begin counting the remaining days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

Scalable vector graphics have become a vital part of digital and graphic identity design. Newnhamm’s stylistically rendered sparkle, along with freephile’s photo-realistic party balloons, offer insight into the wide range of possibilities found in vector imagery.

The Open Clip Art Library is moving into an exciting 2010 with contributions from you and others all over the world.

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

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!

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.

This is a great graphic! He has a mastery over Inkscape’s gradients and making icons look crisp. And, what is great about this piece of clip art is that you can take it right now, and put whatever you want on the screen. Say you wanted to create a postcard or flier about a presentation. You can use this great clip art directly and add your own image on top of it.

He has also created some other very stylized icons of popular media:

We salute AJ this week! Please download, re-use, and upload your own clip art and hopefully you will be next week’s Clip Art of the Week!

The above image I created by taking the photo of Obama, importing it into the free drawing program, Inkscape, and then using the tracing function to convert the unscalable pixels to scalable vector graphics (meaning they may be scaled to any size). Anyone can find content in the public domain, and convert graphics to vector graphics and upload them to the Open Clip Art Library. It is a quick and fast way to contribute to the project.

For this week’s clip art of the week, I am highlighting the global contribution of clip art by Worldlabel.com, a maker of labels. Russell from Worldlabel gave this clip art he had commissioned to the project, and every bit of it got converted to vector graphics in the manner I described above. Here are a few selections:

If you want to donate clip art you created, please do so at Open Clip Art Library. And, thanks again to Russell at Worldlabel.com for both pushing us to feature clip art and for the donation of clip art.