Clip art, in the graphic arts, refers to pre-made images used to illustrate any medium.
Today, clip art is used extensively in both personal and commercial projects, ranging from home-printed greeting cards to commercial candles.
Clip art comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is created, distributed, and used in an electronic form.
Since its inception, clip art has evolved to include a wide variety of content, file formats, illustration styles, and licensing restrictions.
Clip art is generally composed exclusively of illustrations (created by hand or by computer software), and does not include stock photography.
source: wikipedia.
The following is the simple three steps process which anyone can do for free at home
The following are three examples (of many) on where you can obtain the free clip art which the Royal Opera House Muscat logo and entire visual identity was based upon. just copy and paste it into your browser and see for yourself.
Please notice that the “Royal Opera House Muscat” logo clip art was uploaded on Vecteezy website on October 23rd, 2007 and since then it has been downloaded more than 257,031 times from this site alone.
The following example illustrates the original clip art with followed then with a progression to the current official logo of the Royal Opera House Muscat logo.
The lessons to be learned here are that:
The logo is based entirely on clip art.
You can not protect something that you don’t own or have Intellectual Property rights for.
The wide number of downloads of the same vector clip art used for the logo means that it is most certainly used somewhere in the world for something other than the Royal Opera House Muscat
Most important of all…do NOT ever use a clip art or an element of a clip art in ANY logo design, specially when it involves national pride.
NB. In case you were wondering…the logo of the Royal Opera House Muscat was designed by Landor in Dubai there was another incident where Landor got inspired by the (new at that time) logo of Quark Xpress and used it for a chain of supermarkets in Dubai.