Customizing Clipart

By Terence R. Traut, President of Entelechy, Inc.

Like many of you, I come from a training background. Like many of you, we’re experts in group facilitation, engaging our learners, and creating instructionally sound materials. Yet, many trainers are not graphic artists nor do we have a score of graphic artists helping us create our training presentations. As a result, our training presentations often may not adequately represent the professionalism and quality that we’ve built into our training.

The solution for many trainers is to use clipart liberally in an effort to make our presentations colorful, and hopefully, engaging. The problem is that EVERYONE uses the same clipart (if I see the man bending over peering at the ground with his magnifying glass one more time, I’ll scream!). And even the clipart from those big collections looks like, well, clipart.

You can easily customize your clipart to add a level of sophistication and panache to your presentation. Your presentation can reflect the instructional quality of your training.

Since most of us work in PowerPoint®, let me use PowerPoint to illustrate.

Step One:  Pick your clipart. Select a vector graphic clipart object. (Vector graphics often have the file extension .wmf. The other type of graphic – bitmap graphics with file extensions such as .bmp or .jpg – cannot be customized with the technique that I’m about to describe.) 

Below we have a picture of the team working to achieve increasingly difficult business goals. It’s not bad as it exists, it’s just a bit clipart-ish.

Step Two: Insert the graphic into your PowerPoint presentation by selecting Insert and Picture; then select Clip Art or From File as appropriate depending on the location of your clipart file.

Step Three: Turn the graphic into an editable collection of graphic elements by double clicking on the graphic and then clicking on Yes to the message, “This is an imported picture, not a group. Do you want to convert it to a Microsoft Office drawing object?” The graphic below shows the ungrouped Microsoft Office drawing object.

Step Four: You now have a collection of graphic elements that you can modify to customize your clipart. Let’s see how we can customize.

• Example 1: Let’s say that you want to delete the grid and background. Simply click on an unwanted graphic element and press the Delete key. Here we’ve deleted the background and are in the process of deleting the grid lines. 

When completed, you have a graphic that looks less like stock clip art and more like part of your presentation.

• Example 2: Change the color of the remaining graphic elements to create a watermark-type background graphic. Here I changed the graphic elements to medium blue. When placed on a dark blue background, the graphic provides a subtle, sophisticated reinforcement of the concept you’re teaching.
  
  Compare the customized graphic with the stock clip art graphic in the overhead below.

• Example 3: Play with the coloring and the lines in PowerPoint. Try using colors that are close to your background color for a subtle effect.
  
  Here I created a bolder watermark effect by selecting the graphic elements, clicking on the Fill Color button, selecting Fill Effects, and then selecting Gradient. Each graphic element receives a horizontal shading that makes the entire slide simply ooze with class and sophistication.

Step Five: When you’re done playing with the graphic elements, you will want to group them together again so you can move or resize the customized graphic easily. Simply select all of the graphic elements, click on Draw, and then select Group.

That’s it! You now have a customized graphic that looks like it was created by a graphic artist. Your presentation will now mirror the professionalism and quality of your training!

Learn more about Terence R. Traut and Entelechy, Inc. in our Contributor's section.