In January this year Stewart Russell uncovered a bonanza of over half a million clip art, fonts, and sound files from the 90s in an unopened 40-CD set called “Imagine It! 555,000+”, and then very kindly uploaded the whole lot to the Internet Archive. My interest was immediately piqued, not least by wondering what could possibly be contained in a clip art library of half a million files?! Reader, my spelunking was richly rewarded; both in specific images and in the inferred meta story of how the count gets so high.
What is clip art in the first place?
Before the 80s, publishing was the domain of professional printers with specialized machines. Regular people could use typewriters, which produced only text and typically in a single font. The first desktop publishing (DTP) software for home computers was released in the 1980s, but it became truly widespread in the 90s as computers’ graphical capabilities increased. By the end of the 90s there was no birthday party invitation, church fundraiser flyer, or school show poster that wasn’t created by desktop publishing.
The ability to use multiple fonts, text sizes, and colours was neat, but eye-catching graphics needed something more visual. Artistic ability was as unevenly distributed then as today, and the drawing packages of the day made original creation particularly difficult. There was a need for small, licensed images to illustrate how rad your event was going to be.
Enter: clip art! DTP packages came with small libraries covering many use cases, but once you’d received a handful of invitations to birthday parties, you recognized the same balloons and cake images appearing again and again. The height of cool would be to have unique clip art with which to dazzle your prospective guests.
Imagine It! 555,000+
The creators of this specific library were clearly going for quantity as a selling point, with the 40-CD pack and the sheer number of files. It’s not all clip art: one CD is fonts, 13 are bitmaps (the clip art), 11 are photos, 8 for vector images, and 3 for web assets.
The bitmap CDs are organized into folders for different themes, such as Advertising->Art. The examples below would definitely have been used for school shows! Note the convenient blank space for show details in the second one.
I love these ones in Advertising->Holiday. This is how your guests would know they’re in for a good time!
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I started to suspect things could go off the rails a bit when I came across this theologically troubling New Year art. Not sure I would stay in touch with someone who sent me this on a card…
My particular favourites: cow pics
The most delightful section of the library is the Agriculture folder. First, there are some really lovely pastoral scenes, all in black and white and with a woodcut aesthetic to give tonal variation.
As I dug deeper, I started to understand how they’d managed to get such a volume of images. Many files are conceptual replicas of the same idea, such as “two oxen pulling a plough” shown below. The first is a side-on full scene, with other workers and a farmhouse in the background. Below that is a 3/4 shot of two oxen pulling a plough, but with only a patch of foreground and no background. And there are three separate versions of this 3/4 shot, at different sizes and resolutions. Most interestingly, the three are not scalings of one image (as they would be for vector graphics these days), but actual different “carvings” with different levels of detail appropriate to the specific size.
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Next, I found my favourite sequence in the whole set. The concept is “woman milking a cow, with 0, 1, or 2 chickens nearby”. Once again, each pair shows the same concept at different sizes, with small differences in the detailing that make them each legible.
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Finally, there was one unique scene that I enjoyed very much.
Thanks again to Stewart Russell for saving this piece of history, and sharing it with the world! While I couldn’t afford a custom library back in the day, I’m delighted to be able to go through it now, and wonder at the way it came together.