Clipart Deck of Horrors

Image from gograph.com

I can remember the first time I ever used PowerPoint. The variety of colors, word art, clipart, etc. was overwhelming and I used as much as possible. It was so different from Word and Paint [my primary tools up to that point, probably around '97]. I made the same mistakes everyone does in their first presentation: colored font, distracting backgrounds, having every bit of text present so that I was just reading off the slides instead of having cue cards with additional info for the basic/important items on the slides. I loved exploring clipart and finding just the right image for the slide. My mom still has some of my initial PowerPoint-created newsletters and posters covered in stars and generic images of animals and people.

Eventually Google came around and I started to get my images from there - hurriedly trying to find ones without watermarks. I had no idea about copyright rules until probably high school English when suddenly I was bombarded with the differences between foot notes and end notes, works cited and bibliographies, citing quotes and paraphrasing.

As a university student plagued with a news report almost every week about some student failing a class or getting expelled over plagiarism I became very cautious and mildly afraid my professor would run my paper through one of those "plagiarism detector" programs that were suddenly popping up and finding out that I used the same phrase someone else did and I either didn't cite it properly or never even knew it existed [horrible fear of this accidental plagiarism based on a Gilmore Girls episode where Rory got in copyright trouble for using clichés].

As an editor at a tech research firm the copyright rules are very simple: provide links and names for all quotes and statistics right on the slide, include a references slide if necessary [hardly ever done to any kind of standards, i.e. APA, MLA, *sigh*], and either use paid images from our subscription site or source the image [the real site, not Google].

For the first 8+ months I had no real issues with images other than people not giving me the image # so I could buy it from the site [only 5 people are allowed to buy images to minimize costs and confusion]. Then I got a PowerPoint deck that seemed fine until slide 80-something [out of 144]. It was filled with these horrible, generic, pastel, thickly lined clipart images. Admittedly it does say you can use clipart in our standards guide if you have to, but why would you when the paid images look so much better and are more consistent? I spent the better part of an afternoon replacing these images with similar purchased ones. Cartoon-y image of clipboard with stop watch? Replaced with paid image of clipboard with stop watch that looked more 3D and just fit better into the color scheme of the page [brown/white instead of yellow/blue/silver/black]. Funny clipart image of firefighter replaced with photograph of a firefighter.

I told the author what I had done and asked about the images I didn't feel comfortable changing - the "mystery image slide" [I had no idea what meaning he was trying to convey by using them].  He responded by saying that the images were clipart because the paid site is too general and he couldn't find what he wanted there and the clipart worked better.

I sat there in shock for about 5 minutes and then spent another 30 minutes trying to come up with an appropriate/professional response [something other than "What the hell?"]. How could he not find what he was looking for on that site, with a Google-like search engine and millions of images? He had also asked to know which changes I made. I sent him my list of 20+ image replacements, plus another 5 or so images that I sourced because they were grabbed [aka stolen] by him via Google from people's websites and blog posts. I also asked again for the meaning of the "mystery image slide."

He responded to my 20+ lines of corrections with: "Those are fine" and told me that "mystery image slide" was supposed to be facilitated by the presenter. No acknowledgement about the sheer volume of work I did or the fact that the replacement images had the same elements/meaning but actually looked professional; nothing.

I said thanks and mentioned that the "mystery image slide" [still filled with ugly clipart by the way] had no facilitator's notes and asked how could it be explained by anyone. He finally gave me a brief blurb [which I added as facilitator's notes] repeating that it was a facilitated slide. How helpful. Maybe the facilitator's notes were just invisible and I, as a lowly editor, couldn't see them even though I went through the deck at least twice.

My complaint isn't about the poor communication between myself and the author [although that is an area for personal improvement]; it is about the idea that clipart was more useful than paid images. I get that someone did design these images and technically they are paid for through our Microsoft license, but to look at them from a professional point of view, knowing that people who paid to access this document were going to look at these generic, blocky, pastel images just makes me cringe.

I'm sure there's a time and a place for clipart: when you're in school creating your first presentations, when posting something quickly on a website, when you don't have a paid subscription to an image site, etc. but I really try to avoid clipart. I am willing to use my own photographs, usually modified in Photoshop, Google images [with proper sourcing], or anything really to make my work stand out and look somewhat more professional than a middle school project.

***Final note: I did a walk through with an editing colleague showing her the original and then my changes [to make sure I wasn't crazy] and she asked for a copy to give to her husband who is the head of the design department to help build his business case to get designers involved in the research presentations. She cringed too when I showed her the "mystery image slide" and a nearby designer said "Clipart?" in a disgusted tone.

****Last note, I swear: There have been instances of people in the research department using Paint or a similar program to create an image from scratch, but it has a low success rate - only 1 was kept [that I know of] and only then because the author had a really good explanatory slide included in the appendix and the image was used in multiple presentations.