Why I buy this one ?
- 12 gigabytes on 21 CDs
- Hundreds of topics including - Advertising, Agriculture, Alphabets, Americana, Beauty, Calendars, Cartoons, Clothing&Accessories, Computers, Crests&Emblems, Fitness, Flags, Fantasy&Medieval, Religion, and much more
- Over 600,000 royalty-free images
- Over 80% in color
- 55% Vector Clip

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What our customer's say!

"Mostly junk, very disappointing", The quality of the clip art, raster images and photographs is mostly bad. The vector images seem to be traced freehand sketches. I would say about 80% is useless.

"Great Collection of Clip Art", If there is any desktop publishing project anyone has this is the ULTIMATE in clip art. Anything anyone would ever need is in this collection: cartoons, photographs, web graphics, and line art. I bought Art Explosion 200,000 Images and was so happy with it that I upgraded to 600,000 images! I am very happy with my purchase and I'm sure you will be too.

"You wont regret buying it...", If you are a Graphic Artist like I am then this is the clip art for you. Everything is there that you need. You don't need to download anything from the internet at all. And Get this !!!, you can edit the origional artwork or save it as another form of artwork. Not to mention so much clipart to choose from.

"Very good for the price", My newspaper office has a Mac version of this set of CDs. The clip art is primarily used by our graphic artists, although I and other editors have dipped into this collection from time to time.

You have a wide variety of art, for a great range of needs. Like a few other editors, I have no real use for some of the formats in which they are saved, a minor to moderate gripe.

A bit more serious complaint is that, as computers get faster and can handle bigger file sizes, a lot of images in here could be made bigger, and thereby given more detail. I think we would pay an extra $20 for an updated version of this set, and i suspect many other people would too.

"enough clip art for a lifetime of scrapbooking", I love it, love it, love it. I find the art I want; I open it up in PowerPoint, resize as needed and voila; I've just saved myself a bundle in "embellishments".

If I had a complaint, it would be this...the book showing all the clipart is not in color but B&W. But no matter, I'm still enthused about this product.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"must have", If you do a lot of graphic art and design and need an excellent variety of drawing-style clip art, cartoons, professional images, as well as real hi-resolution photography.... this is the way to go!

Comes with a giant book in categories so you see what you're looking at in advance. Want a picture of a jukebox? Look in the index. There you go. Jukebox. A ton of choices too.

I rely on this... don't know what I'd do without it.

"This Collection is Huge and Priced Fairly", Let me get my dissatisfactions out of the way as overall I am very pleased with this collection.

One of my gripes is the choice of format for the graphics. The vector images are WMF files, the raster images are TIF files and the photographs are JPG. JPG is a good choice for the photographs, but WMF is not as universal as Nova development would like you to believe and TIF files are just not one of my favorite formats.

My other complaint is the supplied image browser, an Extensis product. Each disk has a nice catalog, in the form of a database, and the idea is you can use the browser to see the images you are looking for. The major shortcoming is that if you add images to a folder, there is no way to add this image to the database. I also just could not get used to using it it. I freely admit I did not spend much time with this tool. Instead, I use a shareware image browser, or the browser of my graphics program, to view the images in the folder without the benefit of the supplied database. I am much more at home with these tools.

The good news begins with a thick book containing a B&W thumbnail of each image. They are all cataloged and supply the location of what folder you will find the image in. Some people prefer to look through a book to preview the image and for them this is a major plus: Art Explosion is the only collection I found with this feature. While this may seem a like quaint anachronism to many people, I do find myself sometimes browsing this catalog just to see what's there.

What's there is an incredible collection of clipart, backgrounds, photos, cut out letters, buttons (icons) and fonts. The shear volume is overwhelming. The styles range from retro to early Americana to timeless. While some clips are ready to use as-is, other images beg to be modified, and that's what they're there for. There is even a collection of do-it-your-self parts to assemble your own screen being!

The quality of images ranges from very good to excellent. I was a little disappointed when I closely examined one of the TIF images and found what look like scan artifacts. There are too many images to preview all for this type of defect, but from what I've seen this is the exception as opposed to the rule. I can easily clean these artifacts, but they should not have been there to begin with. I was also surprised to find their definition of High Resolution is 300 DPI. While this is adequate, my personal standard for High Resolution is 600 DPI or better.

As a bonus, there is a collection of several hundred fonts and a photo-editing program. I did not install Kai's Photo Soap as I already have a program I use for that purpose. I will let someone else comment on Photo Soap. I am a fontaholic, so some of the included fonts were duplicates of fonts I already had. Overall the fonts represented a useful collection and there were some fonts I did not have, so these were a welcome addition to my personal selections.

This clipart collection is certainly not the least expensive, but I feel it is worth the price based on the volume of images, quality of the images and the printed catalog of images. I found some duplication of the bonus tools with programs I already own and use, but I have no gripe with their inclusion in the package. I was looking at buying clipart, not more programs. For that, I think this package represents a fair value. If I could rate this frationally, I'd give it a 3.75 It's way better than average, but a little short of outstanding and well short of excellent. You won't go wrong with this package as a starter collection.

3/19/2004
I found two of the images in the collection were corrupt and would not display properly. I contacted NovaSoft via e-mail and had a reply within 24 hrs. They sent me two replacement CDs. When I checked the images om the replacement CD, they too were corrupt. I called tech support and within a matter of minutes, I was e-mailed replacement images in a different format. The images that were bad were WMF clipart. The clips e-mailed were in EPS format. The new EPS images were perfect. According to the tech I spoke with, that's the difference between the Mac and Windows versions: Mac packages use EPS instead of WMF files, and the catalog program is Mac specific.

Add another half point to my rating of this product for excellent tech support. My overall rating is now boosted to 4.25. NovaDevelopment did correct the problem, without any aggravation, but the error should not have been there in the first place. I stand by my original Four Star rating: Very good collection and worth the price.

"A Huge Selection of Clip Art", I bought this software as a companion for Scrapbook Factory Deluxe 2.0. The book of images is great. Unlike the previous reviewer, I had no problem seeing the images (that is, they are not too small and grainy). The only problem with the book is that it is very HEAVY! If you can think of an object, Art Explosion 600,000 not only has it included...it probably has at least 10 different variations! I do not believe it is a labor of Hercules to find the image your searching for. The book tells you the category, find the category on the list of CD's, and then the images are in alphabetical order on the CD (as shown in the book). Not bad at all! The only problem is deciding which image to use!

"It comes with BOOK OF IMAGES!!", I've been using clip art to illustrate a dental newsletter for years. I've used Corel, Microsoft clipart, ClipTures by Dream Maker, Art Explosion 125,000 and even online based clip art websites. What is important is that the software has quality images and comes with a BOOK OF SAMPLE IMAGES with an index. Art Explosion 600,000 has both. Most other packages (including Art Explosion 200,000) DON'T include a book of images.

Aronbergvlad is right; there is no real search engine. Don't bother installing the "Art Explosion Installer", or their catalogue browser. The browser only searches the images on the CD that is in the drive. Not the other 28 CDs. It's useless.

However the book of images is just fine for finding images. Just look up your subject the index, find a nice image in the book, pop in the corresponding CD, set Windows Explorer to Thumbnails view and scroll until you see one you like.

Using clip art is not for beginners. It takes practice, but if you're ready, Art Explosion 600,000 is the BEST there is.

"FANTASTIC!!!!!!", I've used Art Explosion Clip Art for many years, first on a Mac and now on a PC. As a professional graphic designer I can't imagine working without it. I have each version they have produced and look forward to the next. I highly recommend it for both the casual user and the professional. The catalog is HUGE and that doesn't even include the photos. Super price for a wealth of clip art and professional quality photos.