I'll admit I myself have an aversion to clip art, but then I make my own stuff all the time and not everyone does that. As a result, I present to you several alternatives to making everything from scratch. I assure you that I've never seen a principal act in the way portrayed below - I just wrote that to add some humor.
Your mission: Replace the school's old web site with a web site that looks nice. "Looks nice," so far as your principal is concerned, means graphics on every page.
The problem: You've hardly any time to finish it (your principal is already planning to show it off this Friday during an in-service) and your school hasn't bought new computers since 1996. You'd use your home computer, but a recent accident involving a cat, pet allergies, and a double tall mocha latte has rendered your home computer temporarily inoperable. What do you do?
Wait, before you start revising your resume (there's plenty of time for that this weekend) there is hope. A good color scheme and table layout can make a web site aesthetically pleasing, and the information you can't reuse from the old site can easily be updated to be current, assuming you're on good terms with the school secretary.
95% of your work is done – now all you have to worry about is your principal's hair brained … that is, visionary idea of including graphics on every page. Making decent graphics on a school computer is out of the question. Not because they don't have graphic design software that can run on the school computers, but because you don't have graphic design software that will run on those computers.
Fortunately for you, there's plenty of clip art out there. The nice thing about clip art is that it's free, but the downside is that you often get what you pay for. Sifting through the pixels, you come across a site called FlamingText.com. FlamingText has clip art you can use, but its most noticeable feature is its free header image creator. Less than five minutes after finding the site you have a title image with the school's name ready to display on the school site. A weaker teacher would have cringed at the pop-up ads, but you toughed it out.
But one title does not a happy principal make. With more exploration you come across a site called Classroom Clipart. This site does have a place for you to sign in and another to sign up for it's newsletter, but it's still free so long as it's used for educational use (K-12 only) and you don't get rid of the watermarks. The clip art is all organized by category, and offers a variety of pictures from low resolution computer generated images to some rather nice looking photos. You grab a few images that relate to the different subject areas and move on.
Your final stop in search of graphics takes you to Web Clip Art, brought to you by the good people from About.com. This free site has it's own clip art (including some background images), as well as tips, tutorials, and links to other good clip art sites. Perhaps you should have come here first? No matter, you now have all the graphics you need and you still have time to go to lunch and complain about working too hard to your coworkers in the faculty lounge – and all you had to do was have your morning classes watch movies instead of doing any real work!
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