Graphics Factory.com Reviewer's Comments

We enjoyed perusing the Graphics Factory.com website. This was the only clip art we've reviewed that offers animations—over 50,000 of them.

The online membership works for all computer systems—Macs and PCs running Vista as well. The images and clip art this service provides work with all popular applications such as Adobe, Microsoft and Macromedia products as well as AppleWorks.

Clip Art Variety:  

Graphics Factory.com offers 297,331 clip art images. Other images are web graphics, fonts (500 of them) and animations.

We were impressed with the variety of animations. However, don't expect complex intros or special effects. They are very simple. For example, moving body parts or blinking eyes. Unlike animated GIFs, you can scale them without losing image quality or increasing file size. Some are impressive, however. For example, on an animated swimming shark, we watched the shark's gills flutter and move with convincing accuracy. 3D animated images were mesmerizing too. And the animated images are scalable.

This online service makes searching convenient, much easier than switching out disks. Single images can be downloaded quickly or multiple images can be downloaded in a compressed folder. Or, you can save your basket and download them at your leisure.

Search Capabilities:  

Graphics Factory.com is fairly simple to search, you just enter a search term and select the type of image you want to search for, such as animation, photo or background. But this service offers few search tools beyond that, for example when we searched for blue water it came back with zero results though the service has many water related images. If you are looking for a font, you have to look through all the fonts to find the one you like.

Clip Art Quality:  

While quality was typical of an online clip art service, we felt there were too many cartoon-style images and few top-quality clip art choices. The photos we downloaded did not look clear when displayed in their full size.

Customer Service:  

We contacted the website support team and they responded promptly. We felt Graphics Factory.com customer service was excellent. And the website was filled with helpful hints and instructions on everything to do with clip art—from how to install fonts in Windows to tips on working with Photoshop.

Summary:  

This service is an affordable online option for those that need simple clip art designs..