he Big Box of Art

By Gary Coyne Wednesday, April 16, 2003.
Tags: Reviews ï Graphics/Design ï

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Provides: Photo, bitmapped, and vector clip-art
Developer: Hemera Software
Requirements: Mac (OS 9.x, X.x) Power PC 233 MHZ
Retail Price: $69.99
Availability: Out now

The big Box of Art is a collection of clip-art for open and free use. The collection is searchable in a database of image thumbnails for (relatively) easy discovery and covers a significant variety of subjects. Although a great value, the whole package leaves a few things to be considered.

This is a Big Box of Art. How big? Try 215,000 images. What kind of images? Try:

• 110,000 vector clip art images
• 10,000 Hemera™ Photo-Objects™ images
• 10,000 raster illustrations
• 20,000 professional color photographs
• 10,000 professional black and white photographs
• 25,000 images pre-optimized for Web use
• 26,000 Web graphics
• 2000 textured photos
• 1,500 animations
• 500 PhotoFont textures

I've reviewed Hemera's clip art materials before with Photo Objects I and Photo Objects II. The Big Box of Art (BBoA) follows the same interface as the others as a large file of thumbnails are placed on your hard drive via the installer and Hemera's search engine lets you find "things." Photo Objects I left a 72.4 MB thumbnail file while PO II left an 85 MB file. The BBoA leaves a 299 MB file. [What can I say, my first hard drive was 30 MB. Who needed more space than that.]

But those are just the thumbnails (seen in an example below). If you want the images themselves, you can find them on one of the 24 CDs. Each CD is slipped into standard paper sleeves is are clearly labeled for easy finding. However, if you plan on extensive use of the Big Box, plan on purchasing one of those CD holders for ready access.

All the images can be saved in either 72, 150, 200, and 300 dpi (depending on whether the image may be used for the web or various qualities of printing) and can be saved in a variety of formats as seen below.

Curiously, when saving an image as a JPEG, there is no opportunity to set the compression level. Likewise, when saving GIF images, there is no way to limit the number of colors used. I found the best and safest thing was to save as a Photoshop Image and once in PS, to perform a "Save for the Web..."

Transparency plays a big part of the image formats both for importing into programs that can deal with transparency and/or selecting an appropriate color background for setting proper anti-aliasing of the pixels surrounding the image.

As seen in the list on the top of this article, the vast majority of images are vector clip art. As they are vector images, they are (relatively) small in size and can appear as a crisp image whether postage stamp size or as big as a billboard. After selecting a vector image, the only option one has is to download the file directly to your hard drive. You cannot even look at a larger view of the image. From there, one can open the image in any vector based program (Illustrator, Freehand, etc.). The vector artwork varies from cartoonish to semi-realistic as seen below. Within your vector program, you can re-size and save in any format needed. Although one can bring these images directly into Word, this isn't recommended as the color fills become very patterned.

The color and black and white photographs are fine standard shots of many variations in image.

The rasterized images are quite nice, most of them have a late 19th century ambiance to them. These images unfortunately, are the most difficult to see as thumbnails. Once you start getting close to making decisions, you need to open the images up in the Image Exporter to view them in a more useable size. This may require you to start flipping back and forth from the various CDs to determine which image you want to use.

The images for all the Web Graphics and Animations are all contained on the last (24th) CD. To look though them you need to use a browser. From the get-go, these are lame. For the Web Graphic, there are five image types: Arrows, Buttons, Bullets, Lines, and Icons. When clicking on each of the options, one is presented with 100 variations of that item (except the lines--there are only 25 of them), and then once you select the item you can then select the color (red, green, blue, yellow, and grey) and then you save the item to your desktop. The Buttons were the most absurd of the group as I could find no way to edit the text on the buttons. As the vast majority of the buttons said "About," unless you have a driving need for a web site where all the buttons say "About," you are not going to find much value here. (Before you ask, all these images are GIFs and therefore do not have layers for the text.)

As far as the Animations go, these were fine executions of this genre, but I am one of those people who find that the vast majority of web animations are annoying. As such I found these images just as useful as buttons that say "About." Your mileage may vary.

Searching for images in the "Web" CD is considerably different from all the other images in the series. For these, the work is fully hunt and dig. For all the other images, there is a search engine. As can be seen in the first image at the top of this article, to find an image you simply type in the search word in the search field and as you type, the database is culled to find the appropriate images from the various keywords. It's reasonably fast, but as it searches as you type, your typing speed is slowed down considerably.

However, what was fine in the Photo Objects sets (with 50,000 images each), bogs down considerably with 215,000 images. As can be seen above, typing in the word "wood" brought up 3954 images. That's a lot of images to scroll through to find the right image.

The big limitation here is that the searching is not boolean ("and," "or," & "not" searches). If you type in the word "dog," you get 2453 images. If you type in "cat" you get 2399 images. But if you start scrolling through each found set, you will find cats in the dog search and visa versa. This is because a good number of these images are called "Cats and Dogs" yet only have an image of one or the other. One of the few filters there is to limit the search to image type such as Photo Objects, vector, web graphic, etc.

Another problem with the search engine is that even though you can do searches on partial words ("wood" will also find "wooden"), whole words are required for combined words ("wood clock" did not find "wooden clocks").

It's one thing to search through 50 images of a found set, it's another matter altogether to search through 500 images of a found set let alone 5000 images. In other words, their search engine is mostly inadequate for the number of images they are dealing with in this package.

And then there is their book. Yes, they also supply a book containing (most of) the images. There are 750 pages with 182 images per page totaling 136,500 images. As coincidence would have it, the chair I showed above is not in the book. However, as all the images in the book are about 1 centimeter square in size and are in black and white only, I found the book is regrettably mostly useless. This is different from the books that accompany the Photo Objects series as those images were in color and therefore easier to scan through. There is no index for this book, only a Table of Contents with very limited information.

Lastly in the collection is PhotoFonts. PhotoFonts provides an easy mechanism for one to create text with a photo-fill.

Unfortunately there is no search engine in this part of the program, and if you look above, you will see that I found the fish for my PhotoFont sample under "school." If you look even closer you will notice that the image is flipped top and sideways for tiling so the fish point both ways and some are upside down. You can import into the program your own images, but as opposed to doing this in Photoshop where you can side the text or the image around to achieve the best placement of text-containing-image, here you cannot. Still, despite the forced limitations, it's a very easy thing to achieve.

You are free to use and publish all these images in printed and digital products but you are restricted from using them in (and I'm quoting the Hemera guidelines here) "...scandalous, obscene, defamatory, or immoral works..." You are also not allowed to sell, rent, lease or collect moneys from these works. When you get the product, you should make a point to check out the guidelines for more details.

At $70, obtaining all these images is a great bargain and for that alone its a good deal. That notwithstanding, the book is mostly useless and the search engine is woefully inadequate for the number of images provided. In addition, too many of the images are effectively duplicates and as such the number of actual different images is quite a bit lower than the number of images provided.

A number of the image variations (such as black and white and or drop shadows) can easily be duplicated in Photoshop. However, not everyone has Photoshop. However, when saving a JPEG image, Hemera provides no mechanism to set the JPEG compression which is vital for saving an image for the web. As such, this product is caught between being a product for people who do not have Photoshop and those who need Photoshop to finish the imaging processing.

FWIW, my final rating is mostly based on the value of all the images and (some) of the details they do provide for saving the images for the web or print purposes. I wish my score were more based on the whole package; it wasn't.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.

http://www.joeryan.com Joe Ryan