Find free clip art at the OpenClipArt Library

By Erez Zukerman, Download Squad – May 28, 2010 at 03:00PM

Filed under: Design, Internet, Open Source

Clip art can be useful for more than just boring presentations; if it’s high quality and in a vector format, it can be used as a basis for other projects, such as T-shirts, stickers, gig posters, etc.

OpenClipArt Library is a large site that features thousands of bitmap and vector clip art images. As can be expected, the content is quite often crappy. I’m sorry, I’m not going to sugarcoat it; if you’re looking for a nice image, you may have to spend some time sifting through a lot of pretty awful stuff.

Still, it is free, and some of the content is vector-based. You can browse by artist, which might help filter the amount of bad clip art you have to endure before you find something you like.

Search could be improved, too. It may just be a matter of policing tag usage; try searching for cat to see what I mean. Perhaps 10% of the results are actually images of cats; the rest is composed of pretty random stuff (green checked border?).

Criticism aside, this is a valuable initiative. The domain name is good, and I hope that, over time, search will get better and more high-quality content will be added. If you have any free clip art of your own, do consider adding it to this massive collection.