Art Nouveau Frames and Borders CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) [Paperback]

Dover (Author)

Book Description

Series: Dover Electronic Clip Art | Publication Date: July 7, 1997

Indispensable collection for enhancing menus, invitations, ad copy, greeting cards, catalogs — almost any graphic project — includes 199 black-and-white designs, among them crisply rendered floral and foliate motifs, butterflies and peacocks, female figures and sensuous cherubs, asymmetrical shapes and undulating lines, all in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications (July 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486999386
• ISBN-13: 978-0486999388
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #799,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #69 in Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Art Nouveau

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great images, poorly delivered, April 4, 2006

By 

Katrina Black "aka Kat Black of Touchstone an... (Perth, Western Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Art Nouveau Frames and Borders CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) (Paperback)

These are beautiful and very useful images - great for invitations, menus and the like. A wide range of shapes and styles within Art Nouveau - some Charles Rennie Mackintosh-inspired stylised roses, and more French Belle-Epoch style curvilinear designs as well. I WOULD have given this 5 stars if it weren't for the actual files on the CD.

The 'jpegs and gifs ready for web delivery' are tiny - about the same size as in the book, whereas I would have thought using them on the web would have been... well, as a border. Big enough to contain something like text, for example. No such luck - they're only about 150 pixels across. What good is a frame/border that small?

The tifs are much larger, at a printable resolution of 600dpi and about 1500 pixels across - but this is where it stunned me. They've been reduced to 2 colours, black and white. Anyone who's worked with graphics at all knows that to get the appearance of curves and diagonals, you need at least 16 colours of greyscale to 'anti-alias'. Technical definitions aside, what it means is that they appear horribly jagged. Considering that curves are what Art Nouveau is all about, this seems particularly ironic.

Even the eps files have had this same treatment - they're not vectors, they're 2 colour bitmaps. Which means to use them, you need to feather the edges to make them look less jagged, or...

I suggest scanning from the book. I know it defeats the purpose of buying a book that has a CD with it, but they're really beautiful images and worthwhile using. They scan well, as they're on good quality paper and printed only on one side of the paper.

I'm more than a little annoyed that the pitch suggests they're ready-to-use in a variety of formats, when the grave error of reducing all of the formats to 2-colours has rendered them pretty much unusable from CD.

I've just bought about 20 of the Dover book-CD sets, and they're not all like this - I'll slowly work my way through and write a review of each after trying to actually use the files, in the hope that it helps people to decide which ones are the better ones to buy. There are new ones coming out all the time - let's hope that they're not all as shoddily treated as the files on this CD.

Dover, what were you thinking? These designs deserved much better treatment. This is from the Electronic Clip Art series - doesn't anyone actually try using the files after the CD's been made?

kat black =^..^= retrokat.com

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book for any art project., March 13, 2007

By 

K. lee (crescent city, ca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Art Nouveau Frames and Borders CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) (Paperback)

This book was great for any art project. I use the easy to use cd-rom to create borders for invitations, brochures, ads, labels, and so much more. The only complaint I have is there are alot of repeat of the same design, I believe they are meant to be different sizes but I found them unnessesary. Other than that I loved it!

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book, September 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Art Nouveau Frames and Borders CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) (Paperback)

This book (with CD) is great. There are lots of images for numerous projects. Having the CD saves lots of scanning time and frustration. Highly recommended.