Don’t let clip art creep into your videos or you will look old fashioned and not convey the professional image business demands.

This is the first in a regular series on business video clichés, starting with something we have all been guilty of: needless clip art.

Creating slides by hand we had enough trouble writing legibly with marker pens; few had the skills for illustration. With the arrival of PCs in the early 1980s we could add simple line art and everything changed.

The choice of clip art was limited to start; I recall buying clip art collections in the mid 1980s. These had a few thousand images spread across lots of 5 1/4 inch floppies.

Even as recently as 1996 Microsoft Word only had 82 clip art images. Microsoft Office now has 140,000+, with lots of  paid and free images only clicks away.

Through the 1990s graphics use exploded. Most of this was gratuitous; the images added no value to the audience and were only there as they were easy to add.

Fortunately sentiment is changing as blogs like Presentation Zen fight to drag presentation design away from unreadable text and corny images.

While classic business presentations improve, web video risks going backwards. The main culprits are screencasts, although I have also seen clip art in live action video.

Just say no to clip art. You know it makes sense.

Tags

Cliche, Clipart, Design, PowerPoint, Screencast

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