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Vol. 5. No. 8 ; August, 2008 
In this Issue: > New Content on Clipart.com > Save On a Clipart.com Subscription > Clipart.com Customer Profile: Franklin Beaver > The Perils of Postage Stamps > Think Utopia. Think Unlimited. > New on the Graphics.com Network > Send This Newsletter to a Friend |
New Content on Clipart.com Almost 1,000 new photos, photo-objects and clipart images were recently added to the Clipart.com collection. Leading off in the photos department you'll find a batch of fresh ones dedicated to the theme of transportation, including such topics as roadways, commerce, trucks and commuters.Next up, we continue our recent initiative to add even more shots related to specific professions, in this case the food service industry, with photos of people at work in kitchens, as well as close-ups of kitchen tools, ingredients and finished dishes. When it comes to real estate, the winning formula seems to still be location, location and location. In the domain of document illustration, there's no doubt that it's people, people and people. Luckily, the Clipart.com collection is packed with a broad range of professionally shot, model-released people shots. This hasn't stopped us from recently adding a big bunch of new ones, this time devoted to young people in natural, relaxed poses. Our thousands of photo-object images remain a popular resource, since they're so easy to use in everything from a web page to a presentation. We've just added almost 100 more, most with a theme of the American flag. Save On a Clipart.com Subscription  More than just clipart, a Clipart.com subscription also provides access to thousands of professional, royalty-free stock photos. For a limited time, Clipart.com is offering newsletter readers a 1-year subscription for only $129.95—a savings of $30.
Clipart.com Customer Profile: Franklin Beaver 
While we're used to seeing Clipart.com content employed in a wide variety of print and online applications, it's rarer to find it used for video. But appropriate for this medium it certainly is, as demonstrated by Franklin Beaver, who pointed us to one of his recent video projects. Franklin's involvement in the project that included five daily videos for use at vacation Bible schools attended by children 4-9 years of age, included writing, producing, shooting, studio narration, graphics and animation, and editing. As Franklin tells us: "I had the idea of using animated photos when I wrote the script and started looking at your stock photos. But my search also included clip art, which turned up all sorts of great child-friendly images of rescue scenes. When I found the series of images of helicopter and fire rescue, all by the same artist, I couldn't believe it. It was as if I story-boarded the whole thing and hired an artist." Franklin employed Clipart.com imagery in three of the videos, with photos used in the animated introduction about clean, safe water (above) and EPS graphics employed for the animated rescue scene (right). "Photographs of rescue scenes may have been a little too real. The graphics did a better job of making the subject into a story the kids could understand." Would he use Clipart.com imagery for future projects? "Clipart.com has become a valuable, immediate resource for my video graphics. Thanks!" View examples of Clipart.com content in the video clips >
The Perils of Postage Stamps by Rick Altman  I have encountered a new and disturbing phenomenon among current slide deck design. I call it the Postage Stamp Disorder. It is created by the convergence of two common tendencies:
1. The compulsion to place untold amounts of text on screen. 2. The belief that adding photos to a slide makes the slide better. The first tendency is a well-documented and all-too-familiar cause of Death by PowerPoint in today's culture. Well-intentioned presenters place complete sentences and fully-formed thoughts onto their slides and then get derailed by the challenge of not reciting the text on the slide. The second practice certainly has merit—photos are more evocative than text. However, after all of that text has been dumped on the screen, there is rarely enough space for anything more than the smallest of photos—the postage stamp. At this point, a photo cannot contribute positively to the slide; it just becomes more visual clutter. And as you can see in Figure 1 (click to enlarge), there is no real opportunity for the photo to figure in a nice slide design, instead being relegated to being dumped into open space. To be honest, it would have been better to have left the photo off a slide with this much text. And that's too bad, because this is actually a pretty good photo representing an industry not known for its photogenic nature. In fact, one of my clients, the Port of Long Beach, hires professional photographers for all of its newsmaking and community events, and has many dramatic and powerful photos of the port in action. 
The potential appeal of this photo is lost in its usage—doomed to becoming a postage stamp amid all of this verbosity. Watch what happens when you make the photo more prominent, as shown in Figure 2. Two important phenomena occur when you enlarge the photo to cover the entire slide:
1. It becomes much more powerful and invites the audience to study its details. 2. It makes it practically impossible to even consider the volume of text that you might otherwise be tempted to include. This is a wonderful development! Figure 2 has enough open space along the bottom to include just the basic ideas of the slide and that is welcome news to both the audience and the presenter. The audience won't become zombies when having complete sentences inflicted upon them and the presenter will be in a much better position to share real ideas about these points, instead of just reciting projected text like a drone. Everyone wins when you make your photos bigger. Rick Altman is the host of the PowerPoint Live User Conference, to be held September 21-24 in San Diego, CA. It covers the whole of the presentation community—message, slide design, software technique, and delivery—and limits enrollment to 250. Complete details are available at PowerPointLive.com. Think Utopia. Think Unlimited. Experience the serenity and the delight of knowing where you'll find that one perfect image. Each time. It's here, in this paradise called Jupiterimages Unlimited. So, come, discover what you're searching for: the beauty, the infinite possibilities, the 12 leading royalty-free collections, plus a variety of subscription plans and flexible payment options. Now that's what we call designing without limits. Thinkstock Images • Polka Dot Images • Goodshoot • Pixland Photos.com • AbleStock.com • PhotoObjects.net • liquidlibrary Visit Jupiterimages Unlimited >
New on the Graphics.com Network Articles and Tutorials • Photoshop Fundamentals: Create an Intricate Beading Effect • Communicating With Pattern: Skull and Crossbones • Exposure Techniques for Complex Lighting Scenarios • More graphics articles > August Freebies: trueSpace and ChocoFlop  For many years, trueSpace has maintained its reputation as a competent Windows application for creating 3D content and animations. Recently the creative dropped its collective jaw thanks to the announcement that trueSpace was now... free! All we can say is, download it while you can.Very different is ChocoFlop, a new Mac image editing application that is currently free while it's under development. It's no Photoshop but it may be all you need. Graphics.com Network News  STEP inside designDoyald Young: Master of Dangerous CurvesThe master lettering artist's path to prominence leads to Dangerous Curves. Dynamic Graphics MagazineHow'd They Do That?: Curl Up With This Cool TrickLearn how to create custom curl shapes in Illustrator.
LiquidTreat: Verterra
 An inventive company called Verterra collects fallen leaves and turns them into disposable dishes, using little more than water and steam. These stylish plates, bowls and platters are technically reusable, but since they're cheap and 100-percent compostable, you don't have to feel bad about throwing them away.
GraphicDesignForum BlogsJust Put Down the PhoneAn Affiliate Program with a Graphical NatureIs You In Or Is You Out?GraphicDesignForum
TheCreativeForum
Jupiterimages Content Sites > Find stock photos on Jupiterimages.com, Comstock Images,
Photos.com, AbleStock.com, Thinkstock Images, Goodshoot,
Comstock Complete, liquidlibrary, Bananastock, Stockxpert
and Jupiterimages Unlimited
> Find photo objects on PhotoObjects.net
> Find broadcast quality clips on Thinkstock Footage
and Creatas Images
> Find clipart on Clipart.com and ClipartConnection.com
> Find Flash imagery on Bigshot Media
> Find music loops on Crank City Music, StudioCutz, eStockMusic.com
BBM.net, Media Music Loops and RoyaltyFreeMusic.com
> Find illustrations on liquidlibrary
> Find animations on Animation Factory
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