ClickArt: Personal Graphics for the Macintosh

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Joan Shogren

1984

Algorithm/Software

3.5" 400K diskette, cardboard sleeve, printed manual

Description

With its first version published in 1984, ClickArt was one of the earliest electronic libraries of clip art available for retail purchase, a significant milestone in desktop publishing. It was designed for use on an Apple Macintosh, unlike the VCN ExecuVision presentation program released the previous year, which ran on an IBM PC.

Published by the personal computer software company T/Maker, the first ClickArt collection consisted of 37 bitmapped black-and-images organized into several categories, including “presidents” and “animals,” which could be pasted into apps like MacPaint and MacWrite. The package was stored and sold on a 3.5 inch diskette.

To produce the images, T/Maker recruited Joan Shogren, a pioneer in the field of computer art. “Everything was hand-done, pixel by pixel, almost like needlepoint,” recalled Heidi Rozen, co-founder of T/Maker. Also per Rozen, the first Macintosh computer hadn’t yet been shipped while they were working on the library, so “we had to borrow Macs from Apple and Joan had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.”