Clip Art, Animations and Icons

Clip art is a collection of ready-made graphic images that can be inserted into documents, presentations, web pages and other projects. The images are typically simple illustrations — drawings, symbols, decorative borders or cartoons — designed to be reused rather than created from scratch. Clip art may be supplied as line drawings, flat-colour vector shapes, or small bitmap pictures, and is often grouped into themed sets such as education, holidays, business or nature.

Animated graphics on web pages are most commonly stored as animated GIF files. The GIF format can hold several frames in one file together with timing information, so a browser plays them in sequence to produce a short looping animation without any plug-in. Because GIF uses a limited palette and lossless compression, it suits flat graphics, simple animations and icons, but not detailed photographs, for which formats such as JPEG are better.

Icons are small images that represent a program, file type, action or object in a graphical interface or on a web page. They are usually drawn at fixed small sizes, often with a transparent background so they sit cleanly over any colour. Effective icons are recognisable at a glance even when reduced to a few pixels, which is why they rely on bold, simple shapes. Clip art, animations and icons share the goal of communicating quickly with a small, reusable graphic, and many are offered free for personal or educational use, though licence terms vary from one source to another.

Frequently asked questions

What is clip art used for?

It provides ready-made illustrations and symbols to decorate or clarify documents, slides and web pages without drawing original artwork.

How does an animated GIF work?

A single GIF file stores multiple frames with timing data, and the browser displays them in order to create a short, usually looping, animation.

Why do icons often have transparent backgrounds?

Transparency lets the icon blend over any background colour or image, so it looks clean on different interfaces and web pages.