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.

Clip Art of the Month for February 2010 will focus on Content regulation.

Whether one stands in favor of Apple’s products or against them, it’s impossible to deny Jobs and Company’s impact on our technological lives. Last week saw the unveiling of what Apple believes will become a “third category” of mobile computing: the iPad. The iPad aims at simplifying the user’s computing experience by merging elements of Apple’s existing laptop and phone releases.

In the new millennium, computing platforms have trended toward more open source solutions. While it may offer the end user a more simple and streamlined experience, the iPad also seems to assert Apple’s intention to focus on technology as a controlled gateway for proprietary consumption.

Images by Frector, adam_lowe, Minduka, flomar, and Tranberry (all above) demonstrate Apple’s influence on modern design and why it cannot be ignored. The reception of their latest product has been decidedly mixed. How will the introduction of the iPad affect the Open Clip Art Community? What ramifications might this have as open source computing progresses? Time will tell. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts and continue supporting Open Clip Art Library by using and contributing vector artwork.

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

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!

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!

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!