Clip art, in the graphic arts world, refers to premade images used to illustrate all mediums. These days, clip art is used to a great extent in both commercial and personal projects, ranging from greeting cards to billboard advertisements. Clip art comes in many forms such as electronic and printed. Most clip art today is created, distributed, and used online. Clip art includes an endless variety of content, styles, file formats, license types.Clip art does not include photographs, and are strictly illustrations created from artists by hand or computer software programs.

The phrase "clip art" emerged from taking images from previously printed works and re-using them for other publishing projects. Prior to the modern advancement age and arrival of computers in publishing, clip art was used through a process known as paste up. A lot of clip art images from this era qualify as line art. In this process, the clip art images are hand cut and attached to a board with adhesives representing a scale size of the finished, printed work. The camera-ready pages are called mechanicals following the addition of text and art created through phototypesetting. Due to the increased popularity and ease of use with modern computers, almost all publishers have replaced the paste up process with desktop publishing since the 1990s.

After the introduction of personal computers: IBM PC in 1981; Apple Macintosh in 1984, the use of clip art by consumers became possible and popular through the invention of desktop publishing. In 1983, the IBM PC introduced the first library of professional clip art with VCN Execuvision. These images were used in many kinds of presentations, including business presentations. Some credit Apple Computer with introducing desktop publishing and the tools required to make it a reality for consumers, with the introduction of the Macintosh's graphical user interface GUI (graphical user interface) in 1984 and the 1985 release of the LaserWriter laser printer. Following the 1985 introduction of software maker Aldus' PageMaker, professional quality desktop publishing became possible with consumer PC computers.

After 1986, Desktop publishing developed a large demand for pre-made, electronic images as consumers began to create newsletters, brochures and other works with their own computers. Electronic clip art developed to fill the demand. Early electronic clip art was simple line art or bitmap images because of the lack of modern electronic illustration tools. With the introduction of the Apple Macintosh program MacPaint, for the first time, consumers were able to edit and use bitmapped clip art.

The T/Maker Company from Mountain View, California was one of the first triumphant electronic clip art pioneers. The company had its early roots with a word processor, WriteNow, that was commissioned for the Macintosh by Steve Jobs. By publishing small, retail collections of images under the brand name "ClickArt" T/Maker was able to take advantage of the capability of the Macintosh and to provide black and white bitmapped graphics in 1984. ClickArt's first version included a mixed collection of images that were designed for personal use. Mike Mathis, Joan Shogren, and Dennis Fregger were the the first illustrators to create clip art for professional use. These images were published in 1984 by T/Maker as ClickArt Publications.

Adobe Systems introduced Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh in 1986. This abled private and home computer consumers the first opportunity to manipulate vector art in a GUI. This made the higher-resolution vector art possible. T/Maker published the first vector-based clip art images in 1987, despite unfamiliarity with the bezier curves required to edit vector art. Graphic designers and consumers quickly realized the advantages of vector art, though, and in the late 1980's and early 1990's, T/Maker's clip art became the standard of the industry. T/Maker was sold to Deluxe Corp in 1994, and then sold again to its main rival, Broderbund in 1996. 

Many pre-computer clip art companies, including Dover Publications, started offering electronic clip art after the mass adoption of the CD-ROM in the early 1990's.

The mid-1990s introduced more innovation in the clip art industry, as well as a marketing focus of quantity over quality. Even T/Maker, whose success had been built upon selling small, high quality packages of nearly 200 images, became interested in the volume clip art market, and in March of 1995, T/Maker became the exclusive publisher of 500,000+ copyright-free images which was one of the world's largest clip art libraries at that particular time. The licensing agreement was transferred to Broderbund.

During this period, word processing companies, Microsoft included, began including clip art features with their products. In 1996, Microsoft Word 6.0 included 82 WMF clip art files. Over 140,000 media elements are currently offered in the Microsoft Office product suite.

In the late 90's, other companies, including Nova Development and Clip Art Incorporated, also pioneered the marketing of big clip art collections, Nova's "Art Explosion" series included, which sold clip art in large libraries of up to a million images.

Resulting from some of the largest mergers and acquisitions in the computer software industry, including those of The Learning Company (in 1998) and Mattel (in 1989), T/Maker's clip art assets were sold each year between 1998 and 2001.

The Internet continued to gain popularity as a retail software distribution channel in the early 2000's. Companies mastered the sale of clip art through searchable online libraries, such as Clipart.com (owned by Jupiter Media), WeddingClipart.com (Letters and Arts Incorporated), and GraphicsFactory.com (Clip Art Incorporated). Thanks to the Internet, clip art is now not only sold as packaged bundles of images, but also as individual images and subscriptions to entire libraries that allow you to download as many images as you want for during the duration of the purchased subscription.

Since 2005, the clip art market has been segmented in several different ways; data type, style, delivery, and marketing method.

Clip art has two data types: bitmap and vector art and is sold on web based channels (Nova Development products) and searchable web galleries (Clipart.com). Vendors may provide images in both formats, or just one. Delivery options vary from retail packages to instant online downloads. Vendors typically market clip art by focusing either on quantity or vertical market specialty and the marketing method often goes hand in hand with the art style of the clip art sold.

Clip art vendors produce or license new and old clip art collections in volume to compete on quantity. Marketed this way, clip art is usually less expensive but more simple in structure and detail, as is typified by cartoons, line art, and symbols (e.g. Nova Development, Clipart.com and GraphicsFactory.com). Smaller and specialized Clip art tends to be more complex, modern, detailed, and spendy (WeddingClipart.com, GoodSalt.com).

File Formats
Electronic clip art is available in many different file formats. Understanding the difference between the individual formats is important for users so that image files, resolutions, and details are correct for the needed results. 

The two different types of clip art file formats are bitmap or vector graphics.

Bitmap (rasterized) file formats are used to describe rectangular images made up of a grid of multicolored or black and white pixels. Scanned photos make use of a bitmap file format. Bitmaps are limited in quality by their resolution, which is fixed at the time of creation. If a bitmap is not rectangular, it is saved on a default background color defined by the smallest bounding rectangle in which the image fits.

Due to the fixed resolution in bitmaps, printing them can result in produce grainy, jagged, or blurred results if the resolution is not suited to the printer resolution. Bitmaps also become grainy when scaled larger than their intended resolution. Some bitmap file formats, such as Apple's PICT format, support alpha channels, that allow bitmaps to have transparent backgrounds or an image selection which uses antialiasing. Most common web-based file formats; GIF, JPEG, and PNG are bitmap file formats. The GIF file format is one of the simplest, low-resolution bitmap formats and only supports 256 colors per image. GIF files can be extremely small in size. Other common bitmap file formats include BMP (Windows bitmap), TGA, and TIFF. Most clip art is provided in a low resolution, bitmap file format that is not good for scaling, transparent backgrounds, or quality printed materials. Bitmap file formats are ideal for photographs, especially when combined with lossy data compression algorithms such as those available for JPEG files.

In contrast to the grid formatted bitmaps, Vector file formats use geometrics to define an image as a series of points, lines, curves, and polygons. Because the image is described using geometric data instead of fixed pixels, it can be scaled to any size while retaining "resolution independence", meaning that the image can be printed at the highest resolution a printer supports, without any loss of detail or quality. Vector file formats are usually superior to bitmaps due to resolution how easy it is to edit them, but are not as widely supported by software and are not well-suited for storing pixel-specific data such as scanned photographs. During the early years of electronic clip art, vector illustrations were limited to simple line art representations. By the early 2000s, vector illustration tools were able to produce virtually the same illustrations as bitmap illustration tools, while still providing all of the advantages of vector file formats. The most common vector file format is Adobe's EPS (Encapsulated PostScript). Microsoft has a simpler and less sophisticated vector format called Windows Metafile (WMF). The World Wide Web Consortium has developed a new, XML-based vector file format called SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) which may be supported by all web browsers in the future (Firefox and Opera support the format now). Vector provides the most flexible, highest quality images for those with image-editing experience or the interest to work with vector file formats.

Image Rights
Clip art usage is governed by the terms of individual copyrights and usage rights. It is important to understand copyright and usage rights of a clip art image so that the image is used in a legal, permitted manner. The most categories of image rights are royalty free, rights managed, and public domain. 

Royalty free clipart images are often sold with royalty free licenses that may be limited or not have any limits and permit customers to use the images personal, editorial or commercial purposes. These royalty free image rights do sometimes vary from vendor to vendor and may have restrictions at certain companies.

Sometimes fine art clip art is licensed on a rights managed basis, meaning that the image is priced for a certain use for a certain amount of time, basically an image rental. Rights managed licensing of clip art has greatly declined within the past 20 years due to the preference of customers of royalty free licensing.

Public domain images are one of the most popular types of clip art since they are available at no cost if you know where to find them. Many images that are labeled as being in the public domain actually are not and are sometimes under copyright, making it illegal to use them without proper permissions from the copyright holder. The main cause for this confusion is due to the fact that once a public domain image is redrawn or edited in any way, it becomes a brand new image which is copyrightable by the editor. Often such images that have been edited are found available for purchase with royalty free or rights managed licenses by the editor.

In 1999, the United States District Court ruled as part of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp that exact copies of public domain images were not protected by US copyright law, however this ruling applies to currently only to photographs. It is not skill, experience or effort but originality that affects copyrightability of derivative images. The US Supreme Court in Feist v. Rural ruled that the difficulty of labor and expenses must be rejected as considerations in copyrightability. It is generally accepted that the creativity required to reproduce an illustration by hand is intrinsically original, and protected by copyright law.

As an example: The large clip art libraries of Dover Publications or the University of South Florida's Clipart ETC project are based on public domain images, but because the images have been scanned and edited by hand, they are again copyrighted images and are subject to very specific use policies. In order for a clip art image based on a public domain source to be truly in the public domain, you must have the proper rights granted to you by the individual or organization which digitized and edited the original source of the image (an original book is one example).

Internet popularity made the widespread copying of pirated clip art (which is then sold or given away as free clip art) very common. In reality, most clip art titled as free is usually illegally distributed. Almost all images published after January 1st 1923 still hold copyright protection under the federal laws in most countries. Images published before 1923 need to be researched to ensure that they are in the public domain.

The exception for images created after 1923 are images which are donated to the public domain by the artist or publisher. The open source community established the Open Clip Art Library in 2004 as a clearinghouse for images which are placed in the public domain directly by their copyright owners. This library contained over 6,500 images by 2006.