If you’re like many of us, you don’t have a lot of money to buy stock images or hire a graphics designer. So that means you’re stuck using the free resources that come with PowerPoint. In previous posts, I’ve discussed ways to.
It only takes a few clicks to get from one image to the next.Even with those free resources available, it’s still time-consuming to find the right clip art to use. So what I’m doing today is helping you get started by listing fifteen of my favorite clip art styles. These are the ones that I commonly use for my elearning courses. About Clip Art StylesAs you search, you’ll notice that not all of the clip art belongs to a “style.” The reason I like to use clip art from the same style is because I can mix and match them and they’ll look like they belong together.
Word Art Style Powerpoint
It gives your course a much more professional and polished look.I like to find styles that have a lot of variety. For example, I may not be interested in all of the clip art images in a particular style. However, by ungrouping them, I can create an assortment of assets like characters, props, and shapes. And since they’re all from the same style they’ll look like they go together.In the example below, you can see how images from “style 148” provide characters, various props, and some shapes that I can use in my elearning courses.Tips on Finding the Right Clip ArtHere’s a post that shows you. It covers some of what I’m talking about today. I also created a video that shares a few tips about how to search clip art. Those might come in handy.Below are some of my favorite clip art styles.
I’m fond of some because of the characters. However, some I like only because of their colors and shapes. For example, “style 1592” doesn’t have a lot of images, but here’s an example where I ungrouped one and used parts of the clip art to create a Flash intro screen demo in Quizmaker ‘09. 15 of My Favorite Clip Art StylesStyle 1366 (no longer available)Style 1423 (no longer available)Style 1426 (no longer available)Style 1441 (no longer available)Style 1445 (no longer available)Update (6/8/10): Apparently some of the styles are no longer available. Here are some additional ones to replace the ones missing.Sometimes it’s fun to just type in a style and see what comes up. For example, the clip art images in “Style 13” turned out to be lucky.:) They’ll work great in a future elearning course. Do you have any favorite clip art styles that you’d like to share?
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April 20 & 21 (Brisbane). Articulate Roadshow:. April 23 & 24 (Melbourne). Articulate Roadshow:.Free E-Learning ResourcesWant to learn more? Check out and free resources in the community.Here’s a for elearning, instructional design, and training jobsParticipate in the weekly to sharpen your skillsGet your and.Lots of cool to check outand find inspiration.Getting Started? This and the will help. One more comment about ungrouping clip art and regrouping to fit your purposes – if you’re doing this on every slide, and you have, say, 90 slides, you’re looking at a HUGE file that takes forever to publish.If you’re playing with them directly in PowerPoint and you don’t have Illustrator, when you like what you have, you can group the image, copy, and paste into Paint, then save it and import it back into your PowerPoint.
This won’t preserve transparency but it does keep your file size down, which is important in larger presentations. If you need smaller file size + transparency, you’ll need to use Illustrator or some other graphics program. Great collection choices! ThoughtsDownloading to ppt is best(one-by-one by copying and pasting I guess, since the MS downloader won’t let you specify where the download will go or add a Style keyword and I can’t figure out a way to select batches of images to copy at one time from the online gallery). I use XP and 2003.You could, I suppose, slowly make yourself a sample gallery by style number by creating a new folder in your clip organizer and pasting in a sample of the styles you like for your own visual reference (adding the style number as a keyword). But that’s essentially creating a database–wouldn’t do that on a shared drive, for sure!
Tom- Your clipart posts are always great. I love using characters in e-Learning. I think it lets you tell a story and create a more interesting learning experience. Nice choice of themes too. I ended up using something similar to 1541 in a recent series of courses. If you use illustrations, the course looks way better when you keep a consistent theme.
I’ll keep an eye on the comments of this blog to see other themes people like.I also have a cartoon theme that I use (and for full disclosure I also sell). These are built in flash and then exported as.pngs with transparent backgrounds. You can see it in the mockup I posted below. The other thing I’m fired up about is a concept I’ve been working on for a few months: pre-built animations where the characters do simple movements. You’ll see these on the first and last slides of the demo. Can you guys give me some feedback on what you think of this?
I put together a 30 second articulate course as a mockup on the link below. @Carmen: there’s no research pro/con for clip art. The issue’s not what type of art as much as how it is used to enhance the learning. My guess is that your organization is reacting to the gratuitous use of clip art. I had a similar experience at one organization where you could only use one PowerPoint file for anything PowerPoint-related. That obviously didn’t work for rapid elearning.So I did an education campaign where I showed the difference between presentation and elearning development.
You might need to do something similar where you show bad use of clip art and appropriate use.