Using MS Office clip art animations?

Last week I taught a class in Hawaii called “Illustrator for the Rest of Us.” The whole idea of the class is that this is the class that shows how you can create fun artwork in Illustrator even if you can’t draw. (I can’t draw for beans, so I’m totally qualified to teach the class.)

I showed how you can open Illustrator’s templates and extract tons of fun symbols and clip art graphics for use in InDesign layouts or on their own.

So yesterday I got an e-mail from one of my students. She wanted to know how she could use some of the interactive clip art from Microsoft in her InDesign layouts.

I was stunned. I didn’t even know Microsoft had interactive clip art. She went me a link to where she had gotten the artwork and I understood.

Over at Microsoft (I’m not bothering to give you the link because I don’t want you using this stuff), they have a huge library of clip art that you can download. Among the static art are GIF animations that have five or so frames that create subtle animation effects.

So how might someone get these GIF animations into an ID layout? It’s not difficult. First open ImageReady (it’s that other application in the Photoshop folder), and then open the GIF animation.

Next, choose File > Export > Macromedia ® Flash – SWF…

Choose the settings and then click OK. You’ve now got an SWF that can easily be placed into IDesign. And it will output in the PDF as a movie.

The only problem is that the pixels in the animated GIF look awful. The artwork looks like Illustrator or some other vector artwork that was converted to GIF pixels for convenience.

But what’s sad is that given all these years that the SWF format has gained popularity, that Microsoft hasn’t added the ability to import Flash (SWF) files into their products.

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