Microsoft Office Clip Art

» see office.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every presentation given in every classroom in this country for about fifteen years was decorated out of the same drawer. Not a similar drawer. The same one. A homework slideshow put together in Ankara at eleven at night and a quarterly review printed in Ohio pulled from an identical library of cartoon men in suits and cartoon globes, because both of them were made in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office came with pictures in it.

The collection is as old as Microsoft Publisher, which shipped in 1991 with clip art in the box. It traveled through Office for two decades, first as the Clip Art Gallery and then as the Clip Organizer, and once the machines were online it grew a second half on the web: Design Gallery Live, later folded into Office.com, where the local drawer could be topped up from a server holding far more than any install disc had room for. The Clip Organizer itself was retired after Office 2010, though the online library outlived it by four years.

On 1 December 2014 Microsoft put up a post titled Clip Art now powered by Bing Images. The opening line was one sentence long. The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop. What went in its place was a Bing search inside the insert dialog, filtered to images under Creative Commons licensing, which answers the question better and answers a different question. Usage had been falling for ten years while people went to image search on their own, so the decision was reasonable and it still ended something.

I was in university while this library was at its most inescapable, and there is no Turkish version of this memory because there was no Turkish version of the drawer. The same handshake and the same lightbulb shipped in 69 languages, with the keywords translated and the pictures untouched. It is one of the few things about that period that was identical everywhere.

~ the case file ~

~ the drawer everyone shared ~

What made it clip art rather than a folder of images was the index. Every picture carried keywords, and you searched the drawer rather than browsing it, so the search terms shaped the output as much as the drawings did. Type teamwork and you got whatever Microsoft had decided teamwork looked like. Millions of people typed the same word and pulled out the same picture, and none of them chose it in any sense that means choosing.

That is how a fixed library produces a shared style, and the style is still legible thirty years on. You can date a document to within a couple of years from the clip art on it. The files themselves were mostly Windows Metafiles, vector line art that scaled without going soft, named with the letter-and-digit codes of a stock catalog rather than with anything a person could read. Archive Team went after the whole thing on 23 December 2014, in all 69 languages, three weeks after the closure.

~ what bing put in its place ~

A curated library and a search engine solve different problems. The library was small and legally clean, and the smallness was the useful half: a few thousand pictures and no decision to make beyond which one. The Bing replacement offers the whole indexed web with a licensing filter on top, which is more material and more work, and the filter has never been as trustworthy as a drawer somebody paid an illustrator to fill.

The illustrators are the part that goes unmentioned. Somebody drew all of it. Thousands of small commercial illustrations, unsigned and paid for once, pressed onto discs that reached hundreds of millions of desks and then switched off by a blog post on a Monday. Nobody wrote about their careers when it closed and nobody has since. The pictures survive because people kept them by accident, inside old documents, on machines that were never wiped.

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