RIP Clip Art: Microsoft axes yet another foundational piece of computing history First it was Clippy — and now it’s clip art: After 20 years as the preeminent way of sprucing up a lackluster Word or PowerPoint document, Microsoft has retired its Clip Art gallery. In its place, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook will simply bring up a Bing Images search window. It would seem that vectorized old-school brick cellphones, yin-yang symbols, and other low-fi line-art oddities arent in keeping with Microsoft’s new, modern aesthetic — and, whether you like it or not, if you use the Office suite, they’re no longer part of your aesthetic either. For the last few versions of Office (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc.), you’ve been able to search a rather extensive collection of royalty-free clip art. Now, that online search tool is being replaced with Bing Images. The search tool will have the “show only images licensed under the Creative Commons” option enabled, so that all of the images returned by your search are free to use. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to search the old clip art library — those sad, depreciated remnants from a bygone era are officially dead. Microsoft explains this move with a single sentence: “Usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines.” Fair enough — and really, with most clip art harking back from the 1990s or earlier, and online search engines becoming scarily proficient at finding high-quality art, it’s no surprise that people just arent using clip art any more. Clip art comes from a time when computers had limited memory, storage space, and low screen resolution; back then, simple vector art made sense. Today, with high-resolution displays everywhere and ample processing power in even the wussiest of smartphones to render bitmap images, clip art just doesnt have the appeal that it once had.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 04:53:36 +0000
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