Week 4:  Clip Art and Design Gallery Live

Clip art consists of ready-made graphic images that are inserted into a document.  If you are working with any Microsoft product such as Word or PowerPoint and wish to use pictures, simple animations, or sounds, the easiest solution is Microsoft's Clip Gallery.  It can also be used as a stand-alone program in recent versions of Windows.  Clip Gallery is integrated with the on-line Design Gallery Live, a source of free images and sounds.  It includes .WMF, .GIF, and .JPG graphics files, as well as .WAV, and .MID sound files.  Moreover, if you insert a .WMF file into a Word document and then save the file as a web page, the graphic image is automatically converted into an appropriately-sized .GIF file.  Thus you can use items from the Clip Gallery to enhance web pages.

The basic procedure for using Clip Gallery in any MS Office program is the same, so let's use Word as an example.  If you are in a Word document and wish to insert a clip object, simply click insert / picture / clip art.  This opens the Clip Gallery.  Alternatively, if you have Windows ME or 2000, you can open Clip Gallery from the Start menu.

When you first open Clip Gallery, you will see the default set of image categories.  You can easily add new ones by clicking on new category.  The most recent version of Clip Gallery offers you three tabs:  pictures, sounds, and motion clips. 

There are two ways to find clips in Clip Gallery.  If you want to browse clips in a particular category, make sure to click the desired tab (pictures, sounds, or motion clips) and then click the icon for your category.  Alternatively, you may enter a key word in the search bar at the top of the window.  Whichever way you search, you will be shown an array of thumbnail images meeting your criteria.  Note that the thumbnail may not display all the details in the actual clip.

When you click on a thumbnail, you have the option of inserting the clip into the document, seeing a scalable preview, adding it to another category, or finding similar clips by keyword.  You can also drag the clip into the document. 

If the image is a .WMF file, it is a vector graphic and can be scaled to any size without loss of resolution.  After you insert the image into the document, select the image by clicking on it, then drag the resizing handles.  If you click on a corner handle, you will retain the aspect ration (proportion of height to width), while dragging the top, bottom, or side handles allows you to squeeze or stretch the image. 

You have a number of options with regard to formatting an image in a Word document.  Click on the image.  If you don't see the picture toolbar, click view / toolbars / picture to display it.  You will notice that there is a text wrapping option in the toolbar.  Experiment with the various word wrap settings to see what effect each has.  You can use the toolbar to crop, change from color to black and white or gray scale (for printing), adjust brightness and contrast, even add a border.

If you want to make major changes to a .WMF image, you can right-click the mouse and choose edit picture.  Now you can add, change, or delete elements individually.  You can also make some changes to a bitmapped image, but since there are no vector drawing objects to manipulate, you have fewer useful options.

In Word, of course, you are designing for print, so you can only insert pictures.  When making a web page or PowerPoint presentation, however, you may also use animations and sounds from the Clip Gallery.

When you first begin to use Clip Gallery, the selection of images may seem somewhat limited, but in fact they are nearly limitless.  If you can't find a suitable clip in the collection on your computer, you can look on the web in Design Gallery Live.  Open Clip Gallery, then click on Clips Online.  You will be taken to Microsoft's website, Design Gallery Live. Alternatively, you can open any browser and enter the URL of Design Gallery Live (http://dgl.microsoft.com).  You can search by keyword or browse by category.  You can limit your search to certain file types, if desired.  Besides selecting motion clips (animated .GIFs), or sounds (.WAVs and .MIDs ), you may also specify whether you want photographs (.JPG files) or clip art (.WMF) files.  When you find the clips you like, click on the download button to add them to your Clip Gallery individually, or use the checkboxes to select multiple clips and download them all at once. 

In some cases, you may want to collect many images for use in a web page, but the pictures you want are in .WMF format in Design Gallery Live.  An easy short-cut if you are on a PC is to preview the image in Design Gallery Live, click on the image, then right-click the mouse.  Now you can choose Save image and specify a file name and location.  This will put a .GIF file the same size as the preview on your hard drive, independent of the Clip Gallery.

Another way to add to your Clip Gallery collection is to import clips into the gallery.  This is useful if you already have some graphics or sound files obtained externally.  Simply click Import Clips and navigate to the desired file on your computer, CD-ROM, or floppy drive.  You will see that you have three options for how to handle the original file.  You can make a copy of the file in the Clip Gallery, you can move the existing file into the Clip Gallery (thus deleting from its original location), or you can leave the file in its original location and let Clip Gallery find it there.  When you have selected one of the three options, click import and you are done.

After downloading or importing clips, you can categorize them as you wish.  One way to do this is to choose the clip, right-click on the mouse, and choose clip properties.  You can change the description, categories, and key words.

Besides Design Gallery Live, there are many other sources of clip art. New collections are always appearing on the web.  You can also purchase collections of clip art on CD-ROM.  The caveat here is to avoid clip art that looks amateurish, "cheesy," or out of date.  Much of the available clip art on CD-ROM (as well as some of the Design Gallery Live content) is derived from advertising in the 1950's and looks old-fashioned, while many free on-line collections have the less-than-professional appearance of early web art.  There are also designer sets of backgrounds and buttons that are available as "linkware."  To use them on your web page free of charge, you only have to link back to the designer's page.  Unfortunately, most of these sets are so ornate as to be nearly unusable.  Be selective, or make your own designs.  A good way to get a sense of what looks good on a web page is to spend some time browsing both commercial and personal web sites.  You'll soon know what works well visually and what doesn't.

Reference links:

  • Design Gallery Live (get clip art, .GIFs, .JPGs, sound files for MS Office or web applications)

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page created by Mary Jacob (msjacob@ucdavis.edu), last revised September 30, 2001