My fellow Gen X designers, we remember clip art! We loved it. We hated it. We loved to hate how our customers wanted to use it. And there was so much of it! Art Explosion Collection: 125,000 Images! We strained our necks and eyes pouring over catalogs of tiny images, trying to guess what sort of detail would actually be in that graphic file once we found the right CD in the folio, spun it up, located the proper numbered file and popped it open. We spent way too long perfecting those clunky vector images so they’d print the way our customers expected.

I just stumbled across Linus Boman’s video, “Why Clip Art Was Everywhere… Until It Wasn’t”, a well-researched piece that covers the entire history of clip art, from the original analog clip books to the rise and fall of Corporate Memphis. If you have 28 minutes to spare, I highly recommend giving it a watch.

He devotes several minutes to Ron & Joe’s Art Parts. They were my absolute favorite! Scratchy, goofy and irreverent… most of it was impossible to sell to any but the most eccentric customers, but it printed beautifully at nearly any size in those one- and two-color layouts, on the beautiful flecked papers that were also ubiquitous in the 90’s and early 00’s. (Oh, the papers! I miss the papers we used to have back in the days of real ink.)

For the most part, I don’t mind that clip art has died. But I do morn the real art we’ve lost along the way.