The economy is just starting to recover and people are actually spending money again. It was tough there for a while — I was making my own wrapping paper and cards out of free clip art just to get by. But now that I have more disposable income, I still use free clip art. I discovered that there’s so much of it around, I’ve become hooked on using it.

The quality of the clip art available online has gone up quite a bit in recent years. As more and more people understand how to use complicated graphics programs, the Internet is filling up with beautiful and quite original images. Some of them are so sophisticated, you can’t believe that people give them away free. Well, they must have their reasons. I find they usually use them to promote pages with advertising or as a lure to buy paid images. And that’s a great trade-off: we get great free images and they get customers.