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 aren’t 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.
The new Office Bing Images search box
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 aren’t 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 doesn’t have the appeal that it once had.
Read: Depixelizing pixel art: Upscaling retro 8-bit games
In general, I’m sure most people will welcome the retirement of Microsoft’s clip art — but it isn’t all good. Most notably, clip art — vector art — is infinitely resizable; bitmap images, which account for about 99.99% of the images on the web (all JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs), cannot be gracefully scaled up. The Bing Images website does have the option to search by “clip art,” but the new Office dialog box (shown above) seems to show a severe lack of options.
Overall, of course, the biggest loss will be felt by the nostalgics among us. The cessation of clip art will shake the same dusty foundations of modern computing as the death of Clippy, the retirement of Winamp, and the sad, long-dead mating chirrup of a 56k modem. Fare thee well, Microsoft clip art — you will be gone, but not forgotten.
The question now, of course, is what will Microsoft kill off next? Surely Comic Sans is too sacred… but… who knows.
Now read: Microsoft releases free Office apps for iPhone and iPad, Android coming soon
Source Article from http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/195179-rip-clip-art-microsoft-axes-yet-another-foundational-piece-of-computing-history http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/clip-art-german-windows-xp-640x353.jpg
RIP Clip Art: Microsoft axes yet another foundational piece of computing history
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