As a professional website builder, you should know the importance of photo clip art. Clip arts help create illustrations and backgrounds, giving customers a positive first impression. But getting the perfect clip art is a different story altogether. You might need to hire a quality photographer, who may set you back good money. But thankfully, you can download royalty-free clipart from hundreds of websites if you don't have the time or money to hire a photographer. So, in this article, we want to discuss the best websites to get high-quality copyright-free clipart. But first, let's discuss what clipart is.
In this article
Part 1: What is Clip Art?
Clip art might sound alien to you if you're still new to photography and website building. Well, clipart or clip art is simply a graphic image made using pre-made photos. Typically, clipart is used for illustrations on printed or electronic media. Besides websites, you can also find clip art on infographics, mobile applications, trademarks, logos, and more.
But why use clip art instead of traditional photos on your website? The thing is that clip arts look more cartoonish. This gives them a more universal feel on whatever website you're working on. In addition, clip art will seamlessly fit inside your texts because they don't have rigid triangular frames like stock photos. Of course, this can make your page more interesting.
In the meantime, clip art can come in numerous file formats but is divided into two categories. They include:
- Vector graphics: Vector graphics are images generated directly from geometrical shapes. Because of this, vector graphics give more explicit clip art than traditional photos. In fact, vector illustrations can be printed or processed at the highest resolution without losing the original quality. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is the most used vector graphic format on HTML5 browsers like Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera.
- Bitmap: Bitmap is a raster image for creating website designs. BMP images provide smooth color transitions with a wide array of shades. Just think of it as a mosaic which uses a close set of materials or stone. However, bitmaps have limited resolution quality, leading to blurry or grainy results after printing. The most common bitmap formats you can use on your website project include JPG, PNG, GIF, and WebP.
It is also worth noting that clip art images are governed by usage or copyright acts. The most common rights include royalty-free, rights managed, and public domain clip art. So, in this guidepost, we'll focus on where to get a public domain and royalty-free clip arts, which are available to use without paying licensing fees.
Part 2: Best Sites with Public Domain Clip Art
A public domain image is clip art that never had any copyright in the first place. And if it had, the license should be expired when you find it online. So, let's discuss where you can get public domain clip art for educational or commercial use.
Public Domain Clip Arts for Educational Use:
Public Domain Clip Art is an online platform where you can get an unlimited collection of public domain clip art. The website has a massive collection of free educational clip art to download without registering. The clip arts come in hundreds of categories, including science, education, plants, family, and more. Just find a category and download your clip art.
Vector Characters is home to a wide assortment of vector characters, illustrations, and mascots. On this website, you'll find vector graphics for boys, girls, superheroes, businessmen, cute cartoons, robots, and more. You'll download the vector characters in Ai, PNG, PDF, and EPS formats. However, you'll have to pay to download premium graphics.
Artvex is another excellent public domain clip art resource for teachers and tutors. The website features over 10,000 clip art divided into numerous categories. This makes it easier to find educational clip art. Teachers can discover perfect public domain clip art under categories for school, science, nature, animals, and religion.
Is your child showing signs of excellent photography skills? Introduce them to this public clip art resource website. Here, you'll find over 400 human and monster clip art for kids. Although most clip arts are for paid users, you can also find a fantastic collection of freebies. Overall, we find it perfect for kids and teachers.
1ClipArt is home to 10,000+ royalty-free clip art spread across 300+ categories. Each clip art category is unique, with a wide assortment of designs. For example, you can go to the money category and download clip art on sub-categories like money, symbols, words, and cashiers. You'll find clip art for ETR machines, banknote counters, and more.
Public Domain Clip Arts for Commercial Use:
Founded in 2010, Pixabay photos have a CC (Creative Commons) license, making them free to use for commercial, educational, or whatever project. The website features 2.5+ million copyright-free images, vector graphics, clip art, illustrations, music, sound effects, and videos. Head to the website, choose the "vector graphics" category, and download your clip art for free.
Unsplash is one of the most visited sites to download royalty-free images. This website also lets you download perfect clip art images for commercial use without registering or paying anything. The website is powered by millions of photographers who are fed up with stock imagery.
The name says it all - this website is home to millions of royalty-free clip art pictures to download without fees, watermarks, or registration. The 1+ million pictures are perfect for web admins, bloggers, students, businesspersons, and any project that needs free images. And yes, you can browse through the extensive gallery by purpose, style, subject, and more.
You can find almost any clip art photo on Free Stock Photos. The extensive collection features 14,000+ editorial and commercial royalty-free clip art for downloading without payment. You can download clip art by categories like most viewed, most downloaded, most popular, and more.
Pixels is more like Unsplash, just that it features more photos. Owned by Canva, Pixels is powered by a generous photographing community that ensures you can find any phto for your project. The website distributes more than 3 million stock videos and photos for commercial and educational use. By the way, Pixels started with around 800 pictures in 2014.
Part 3: Alternative Ways to Get Royalty Free Clip Art
Can't find the clip art you're looking for from the websites above? Don't worry because there are many other resources to download educational and commercial clip art. Below are our two recommendations:
Did you know that you can directly add clip art to your Word document or PowerPoint Presentation without uploading anything? These two applications allow you to search for online clip art and add them to your document or presentation with a single click. For example, if you're using Microsoft Word, click Insert > Online Pictures and type the clip art category you're looking for. Then, open the Type drop-down arrow and clip Clipart. Now select and picture and insert it into your document. But you must be using Office 2010 or newer to access this function.
If you've used Filmora 11 to edit your media files, you'll agree that this is one of the most innovative desktop applications. This program features unlimited royalty-free media to download from Filmstock and apply to your video project. Filmstock is powered by popular sites like Unsplash, Pixels, Pixabay, and Giphy, meaning you can find whatever you're looking for here. Besides images and clip art, you can also download licensed music, sound effects, and videos. In addition, you'll find free transitions, filters, titles, overlays, intros, and outros.
Part 4: FAQs About Clip Art
What's the difference between raster images and vector graphics?
It's simple! Raster images are resolution-dependent because they use tiny pixels. On the other hand, vector graphics are digital illustrations or arts created using geometrical shapes. Now you know why vector graphics have better image quality than raster images.
What is a public domain image?
A public domain image is a vector graphic, clip art, or photo with an expired or non-existent license. These photos are free to use for commercial or personal purposes.
What is a royalty-free image?
Royalty-free clip art or photo is an image with a special license for commercial or individual use. In short, they are licensed but made accessible for you to use by the website. A good example is Pixabay which uses the universal Creative Commons license.
Conclusion
Now you have a more profound idea of clip art and the difference between royalty-free and public domain clip arts. But whichever website you choose to download a photo clip art, ensure that the photos are licensed to avoid embarrassing copyright issues. Good luck!
