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

by Dover (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Indispensable collection for enhancing menus, invitations, ad copy, greeting cards, catalogs—almost any graphic project—includes 199 copyright-free 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. Disk contains all items in book.

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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,620 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #5 in	Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Art Nouveau
  #27 in	Books > Arts & Photography > Design & Decorative Arts > Graphic Design > Clip Art

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 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)

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

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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.

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing , August 13, 2007

By	Becca (Baton Rouge, LA USA) - See all my reviews

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.