Clip Art & Buttons

[tt]

I am working on a HyperCard stack, and I was wondering if anyone can point me toward any 1-bit clipart collections. I am specifically looking for button icons that look like hardware switches, buttons, and dials. Other collections would also be interesting.

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

It should be possible to take any minimalist icon, or clipart, and down convert it to 1-bit in a bitmap editing application like Photoshop. Quality would vary depending on the source.

 

[tt]

Yes, but there is usually a style and clarity difference between art drawn in bitmap, vs. down-sampling existing art.

 

[beachycove]

You might find some suitable artwork in FileMaker 2. FM3-4 certainly included extensive button and dialog artwork, in order to provide a flexible set of graphics options to which it was possible to attach a script by which FileMaker would be told to do something, but much of it was by versions 3 and 4 in colour.

The other obvious possibility would be certain applications in the Claris suite: not Works but the more specialist applications like ClarisDraw and ClarisImpact. These had an identical set of graphics libraries, which included (mostly) B&W line art for all sorts of things, including more esoteric stuff such as computer networking; ClarisCAD might have additional resources. Much of the line art used in Claris products right up to the end of the company name should be usable in Hypercard.

 

[Scott Baret]

I still use a ton of 1-bit clip art, which I prefer due to its ability to duplicate nicely on black and white copiers.

The collections I typically pull from include:

1. WetPaint by Dubl-Click Software. I have two libraries of WetPaint (original and All the People). There are about a dozen of these libraries out there but all are tough to find. Dubl-Click Software has been defunct for some time but was one of the pioneers of digital distribution. (I bought one of my two sets that way, the other is on three 3.5" 800K floppy disks). Each set includes tons of bitmapped images. Some have themes while others are general collections. The real gem is "The Wet Set", which had all of Dubl-Click's libraries on CD. Note that some images were from an earlier collection called Mac the Knife (from Miles Computing).

2. HyperCard's "Art Bits" stack. The content tended to change by HyperCard version, but most included several categories of images. It's not as extensive as WetPaint but has a lot of nice selections, including some that can easily be placed into a HyperCard stack as interface elements. There was an additional collection included with the HyperCard for Education set for classroom use.

3. The images from the original "The Print Shop" (the monochrome version, not "Deluxe"). The graphics come in four sizes (small, large, horizontal full panel, and vertical full panel) and can easily be exported via clipboard or a MacPaint document. (It is also possible to import MacPaint files to Print Shop). The images aren't categorized, but you'll be able to find just about anything you want.

4. Claris images, pre-ClarisWorks. These were sold sometime in the late 80s/early 90s when MacDraw II was current. The selection isn't huge, but it's got some nice stuff. It's also nearly impossible to find--I think I may have one of the only surviving copies of these disks.

5. Cairo symbols, bitmapped. This can be done by typing in the Cairo font in a paint program, which turns them into bitmaps. I think some of the earlier versions of HyperCard had Cairo symbols in their Art Bits stacks.

6. Free/public domain bitmapped images from old BMUG collections.

 

[tt]

As I suspected, the many great sources are probably long gone. Probably harder to find than old programs. "The Wet Set" does look promising with almost 7,000 images!