Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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!

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.

I purchased this book out of the many titles available mostly because of the CD. Like other reviewers, I found the images on the CD basically useless for graphics purposes. I did not intend to use the images as they come, but rather to manipulate the drawings and add my own features. However, the line quality is very poor and gets worse after enlargement.
I suppose I can redraw my preffered images on a draw program, or even do it by hand, but that would defeat the purpose of using images from a book to speedily create artwork for production.

The images themselves are quite lovely though.

This is a good deal for your money. I still like the borders and corners better, but this at least has a good variety to choose from and high resolution images.

The ppi is far to small to enlarge. I had hoped to use the frames for digital scrapbooking, but the images are not suitable for that purpose.