OpenClipArt.org is a fantastic resource, and offers a treasure trove for people on small budgets. It does take a lot of time to comb through and find good resources though. I’ve found that the lack of good filters in their search engine make finding art really difficult to find. You can’t sort by style, or file size, or even recently uploaded. This isn’t a complaint, mind you, as I really appreciate the work the folks behind the open source project have done. It’s just a shame they don’t have a data geek working with them who could throw all of that awesome art into a sortable DB with some good tagging so that people could quickly find what they need.
We’re trying to do this ourselves, little bit at a time. It’s slow going! I’ve gotten through a couple of thousand images, things like animals, flowers, clothes, food, etc - but the work I have to do to get these images ready for use in our system is pretty time consuming. As there is no uniformity to sizing or creation methods, and some of the images even use bitmap elements inside of them - I have to pre-process each piece of art before we can use it.
But the good news is that we’ll keep going on this - little by little! We hope users will submit suggestions to us, or even folders of open clip art stuff they’d like to see up inside of Kwippe. We would have to verify that it actually came from OpenClipArt.org though, as licensing is really important.
The benefit to users of truly Public Domain artwork is enormous. You can use it for anything, and not having to worry about copyright, attribution, etc is a great thing. Logos especially can benefit from adding Public Domain elements - whereas you can’t really do that with work that is copyrighted, even under a liberal license.
We hope to see OpenClipArt.org continue to grow - and hopefully they’ll get some sorting and filtering soon to help reduce the time it takes to find a super cool design.