Children of the 20th century can say goodbye to yet another 90s icon that has morphed into an outdated piece of technology in a world where teenagers eat Facebook posts for breakfast.
Microsoft is quietly killing off Clip Art, its database of low-fidelity, two-dimensional vector images that helped many a college student in the 1990s bring color to their school projects.
As an alternative, Microsoft is pointing users to Bing Image Search instead, which has a filtering tool that allows users to search for royalty-free images they can use for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
The demise of Clip Art was announced in a blog post containing a brief memorial dedicated to the glory days of old-school graphics.
"The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop," writes the Microsoft Office 365 team.
In an earlier blog post that has since been deleted by Microsoft, the company says more and more people have stopped using Clip Art for images as search engines, such as its own Bing and Google, have made it much easier for users to look for royalty-free images that have a better quality than those offered on Clip Art.
"Bing Image Search has higher-quality images that are more up to date," wrote the Office team in the deleted blog post. "For example, searching for 'cellphone' gives more variety and modern looking phones instead of the old-school bricks from Clip Art."
On its support page, Microsoft teaches users how to obtain images from Bing Image Search. In the search box, they can enter a keyword indicating the kind of image they are looking for. Microsoft says users can still use clip art images by typing in keywords such as "clip art cellphone" or "clip art coffee." Next, users can click License on the dropdown menu to signify what kind of image they want to use. Users can filter the images in the search results by the type of license that each image has, including public domain, free to share and use, free to share and use commercially, free to modify, share and use, and free to modify, share and use commercially.
Although many people have stopped using Clip Art since search engines made looking for images online possible, Clip Art's demise, like that of the annoying Clippy Online Assistant and Merlin the Tip Wizard in 2010, will be a great excuse for children of the 90s to come together in a nostalgia fest reminiscing the technological linchpins of old.
Fare thee well, Clip Art! We never truly know what we have until it is gone.
