May the Luck of the Irish be with you!

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It's that time of year that everyone who is or pretends 

to be, 😉🍀 celebrates being Irish for a day!

We've put together a list of popular Irish sayings , facts and traditional dishes, along with some wonderful images from Vital Imagery Ltd sites:

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• If you’re enough lucky to be Irish... You’re lucky enough!
• May your thoughts be as glad as the shamrocks. May your heart be as light as a song. May each day bring you bright, happy hours that stay with you all the year long.
• May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far.
• May the roof above you never fall in and those gathered beneath it never fall out.
• May the saddest day of your future be no worse than the happiest day of your past.
• Wherever you go and whatever you do, may the luck of the Irish be there with you.
• May misfortune follow you the rest of your life, and never catch up.
• What butter and whiskey won’t cure, there is no cure for.

Some Irish Facts and Traditional Dishes

Did you know?

• The Irish consume on average 131.1 litres of beer per year - the 2nd highest per-capita consumption after the Czech Republic.
• Famous Irish breweries include Guinness, Smithwicks (Kilkenny), and Harp Lager.
• The three most famous symbols of Ireland are the green Shamrock, the harp, and the Celtic cross. 
• Ireland's flag has three colours for a reason. The green represents the Gaelic tradition of Ireland, the orange is meant to represent those who followed William of Orange, and the white stripe in the middle represents peace between both. 
• During the gold and silver rush years in the second half of the 19th century, a number of the most famous and successful miners were of Irish and Irish American birth....Over time this association of the Irish with mining fortunes led to the expression 'luck of the Irish.'

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Traditional Irish dishes include:

• Irish stew (made with lamb, mutton, or goat)

• Bacon and cabbage (with potatoes)

• Boxty (potato pancake)

• Coddle (sausage, bacon, and potato)

• Colcannon (mashed potato, kale or cabbage, and butter)

  

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Wishing you a Safe and Happy St. Patrick's Day Weekend!

Spring Forward with Clipart.com

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This weekend, in most of Canada, the United Sates and many other countries around the world, daylight savings will be observed.

There have been many years of debates regarding the benefits, or lack of, for daylights savings.

For me, just like Timmies "roll up the rim" this is another indication that spring is near but outside of that and it interrupting my sleep schedule, it doesn't really seem to matter either way for me.

When DST was introduced, more daylight was a good thing because it meant less use of artificial light and helped to save energy. 

Modern society, with computers, TV's and game systems uses much more energy now even with the extra natural light.

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Changing the time, even if it is only by 1 hour, disrupts our body clocks or circadian rhythm. For most people, the resulting tiredness is simply an inconvenience. For some, however, the time change can have more serious consequences. 

It can be difficult to get back on a good sleep schedule and for some it takes a couple of weeks to get our body clocks to catch up to the time change.


Let's think about the positives...

More time in the sun! 
More time to run errands without it feeling like it's past your bedtime 
and just the reminder that summer isn't far off.

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These and many other seasonal images can be found at Clipart.com!

Choose from 1-week to 1-year subscriptions.

 For more information contact support@vitalimagery.com

Content Management For Non-Designers

Not only is it important that your content reads well, but you also want it to look great!

You don’t have to be an amazing graphic designer to create great blogs, social media content or presentations. You also don't have to hire a graphic designer to create all of your content.
 

Visual content is important to blogs, social media and presentations. 

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The picture superiority effect refers to the phenomenon in which pictures and images are more likely to be remembered than words

Your audiences time is limited. Images are often shared 50% more than content that is very wordy. You want to grab their attention and get them to share and like what you are putting out there.

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I'm always encouraging people to save time and money by using high quality images and graphics from stock image providers like iCLIPART.com and iPHOTOS.com that you can just alter slightly to accomplish your personal needs.

 

You will still have to spend a little time on editing and making sure your presentation best represents your company or you. The time will be far less than having to take your own pictures or create your own graphics.

It is important to continually grow  and learn. 
Here are some tips to remember:

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                             Use Quality Images

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                             Buy What You Can't Create

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Just by investing a few dollars into stock images and spending a little time in software programs like Photoshop, Illustrator or Corel you will have your social media content or presentations looking better in no time! There are many video tutorials you can watch to help make simple changes in these types of programs.

Stock Images used can be found at iCLIPART.com. 
iCLIPART.com contains over 8 million royalty-free clipart images, photos, web graphics, animations, fonts and sounds. Subscribe today and receive access to this amazing collection!

Images used:

Clipart ID: #1355396 Original Green Brain Vector Image

Stock Photo ID: #328340 "Like"

Stock Photo ID: #301436 Original Pencils with One Point
  
Stock Photo ID: #1582835 Fresh Broccoli

Clipart ID: #1176436 Content Services 

Let's Talk About Vector Images

If you are just beginning to get creative with images or if you have ever had any graphic design work done for you, you have probably heard the term vector image.

Digital art can be categorized in two main groups; vector images and raster images.

Vector images are computer made with points, curves and lines. They are based on mathematical equations instead of designated amount of pixels. Vector images can be enlarged or zoomed in and there will never be blurred lines or jagged lines. The opposite is true for raster images, if you blow them up they will become pixelated.

In the graphics world, vector images are what most logos, printed and published materials are created from.

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You don't have to be a graphic designer to create great looking logo's and images for your business, schools, or personal projects. Search for stock vector images on iCLIPART.



Vector images can be used in software programs
  like Adobe or Corel and usually have an .EPS, .AI or SVG extension. 
 
Even if you don’t have a program to open your vector images, you should always save your vector images in case you need to send the vector format to others.



The best thing about working with vector stock images is that you can pull them apart to create exactly what you need. Change colour, remove unwanted part or add text.

With the bakery vector image I was able to change the colours, remove the bread and I could add my name.

Without spending a fortune on a graphic designer or years of schooling, you can create images from the stock vector images that our creators have design and edit them to suit your small business, school or social group or home projects.

   
With this vector image of a parrot and flowers from iCLIPART.com I was able to easily change the background colour, move the parrot and add text.

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You can take parts of a vector image and layer it on top of another image or add to the vector image you are using.

Depending on the program you use, you can search tutorials on how to make small changes.

The possibilities are endless!






iCLIPART.com has a huge collection of images to help you bring life to all your ideas, projects and business creations.

For any additional information contact support@vitalimagery.com

Winter Blues

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Summer Dreaming

It never fails, every February
I start to really dream about
summer, or at least warmer
weather.

In part, it could be
because of all my social
media feeds that are swamped
with friends and family
vacation pictures.


 



If I see one more image of someone's feet 
with a pool or beach in the background ....

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I'm actually really happy for anyone who has been able to
escape the "polar vortex" we recently had to deal with.

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I was never one for travelling in the winter.
I'm more of a car-trip type of person, but as
I get older and get more aches and pains,
the thought of spending some time on a
warm and breezy beach while everyone
back home is freezing is becoming more and more appealing.

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For now,  my "dreams" will be helping me beat the Winter Blues!

All images can be found on iPHOTOS.com

 

Advanced Keyword Search Features on iCLIPART.com

 Advanced Keyword Search Features on iCLIPART.com

 

1. Enter your keyword search in
the search bar on iCLIPART.com

In this example I will be using the keyword pie.

2. Choose the file type you would like.

If you are only interested in clipart images you can choose just clipart from the drop down menu.










  


3. For more features click on
the advanced search button.

Here you can change things like:

a) the amount of images found
in your results.

b) the orientation you are
looking for (square, portrait
or landscape).

... and more.










 
 
4. You can exclude a keyword that you don't want to be included in your search. I'm going to exclude "chart" so that I can try to eliminate any pie chart images.

iCLIPART.com contains over 8 million royalty-free clipart images, photos, web graphics, animations, fonts and sounds. Subscribe today and receive access to this amazing collection!

5. You can change the amount of images in your search results here. In this example I will be increasing my result to 80 images per page.

Having this feature can greatly
reduce the amount of pages
you have to search.

















6. In the next sections you can:

a) match all your keywords or some of your keywords

b) choose all files, files that are new this month
or new this year.

c) choose orientation (square, portrait or landscape)











7. In the final section you can choose the specific file type you are looking for and whether you would like just colour images or black and white only.

I hope this helps to understand our advanced search features on iCLIPART.com

for questions or concerns please contact support@vitalimagery.com

“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.” - Neville Brody


For a video on the same tutorial, please visit: YouTube

What Was Popular in 2018

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As we reach the end of January,
we start to think about how hard it is
to keep those well intended resolutions
and we also reflect on how 2018 went.



We have put together a little 
information about what 
was popular on iCLIPART.com 
in 2018.


One thing we can learn is our users aren’t just all about business! We’ve had a lot of fun image searches as well.

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Retro styles and colors, 
Japanese Culture (Kawaii) 
and Eco-Conscious 
searches were popular 
among our clients.

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Some search terms made us 
think our users were very 
hungry or that we have 
many business users 
that could be creating 
menus, advertisements, 
and other image content 
that will help make their 
businesses grow.

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Although bright vivid colours are very popular, some other popular colour 
combinations for the year were:

Red and Gold
Black and Gold
Red and Black








Some search terms that made us chuckle:

Leaping Baby
Redneck Wedding 
Head up a$$
Leprechaun Puppy    
                ...and trust us, we had to search to see what they found! 

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What's ahead in 2019?

Graphic designers will continue to be looking for bold fonts, animations, bright vivid colours 
and retro styles.
 
Geometric shapes, authentic stock photographs, and colourful minimalism (a bit of an oxymoron) will continue to be popular in 2019.


 

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We had a great 2018 
and are looking forward 
to seeing more great 
content from our creators!

Vital Imagery 
(iCLIPART.com, iPHOTOS.com, Clipart.com and Animation Factory) 

is continually working hard at improving our sites.
For questions please contact: support@vitalimagery.com

www.vitalimagery.com

TIP: When you find an image you like, try our "Browse other images in this collection" feature.

DPI - Doesn't Really Matter

Sometimes people confuse 
DPI (Dots Per Inch) and 
PPI (Pixels Per Inch)

When talking about the inking of prints DPI means Dots Per Inch. Just to make everyone confused DPI is also sometimes used to refer to Pixels Per Inch.


To be technically correct we should really refer to resolution as PPI or px/inch or px/cm. The DPI of an image is not what makes the quality of a print. The resolution quality of an image is its pixels (megapixels).



Here are some factors that effect the quality of an image:

1. The size (pixels) - higher is better

2. The quality of the recording device (like a camera’s optics and sensors)

3. The file format it is stored in

4. The technical proficiency of the photographer

There can be many other factors.



If the number of pixels do not change in image editing software, it really doesn’t matter what the DPI/PPI is set to. It won’t change the quality of the image. Some printers will only accept a resolution between 200 and 300 in order for it to believe the image is of photographic quality.

So again, if the number of pixels of an image do not change, then it has the same digital resolution no matter what number is parked in the DPI/PPI setting of the photo.

Scanning a photo and DPI:

If you need to print a 4x6 photo at it's original size, you would scan it at 300 DPI. If you need to print it at a larger size, like an 8x10 photo, you would need to scan it at 600 DPI.
Keep in mind not all devices are capable of doing this.

Meeting Print Shop demands:

Using the 300 PPI criteria, if the image is to be printed 7 inches in size, then your digital image has to be a minimum of 2,100 pixels in that dimension (2100 pixels / 300 PPI = 7 inches)

Print shops and designers need to be careful not to reject a perfectly suitable photo because the DPI/PPI setting in the photo is not 300. A photo that is 1500 x 2100 pixels in size with a DPI/PPI setting of 72 (the default in most digital cameras) will print to 5" x 7" at 300 PPI. Putting it another way, at 5" x 7" it is a 300 PPI photo (no matter what the internal DPI/PPI setting is).

I hope this helps you to understand the often confused meaning of DPI/PPI

Images used can be found at iCLIPART.com

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Is it a Time of Year You Enjoy or Dread? Valentine's Day

 Valentine's Day

The holiday is said to have origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. At the end of the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I, replaced Lupercalia with St. Valentine's Day. It came to be celebrated as a day of romance from about the 14th century.

The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend claims that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.


Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first “valentine” greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed “From your Valentine,” an expression that is still in use today.




Valentines Day is typically celebrated in Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, Australia and the United states.


Did you know? Americans are expected to spend over $1 billion on cards, making Valentine's Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas.


The exchange of hand-made Valentines has been popular by Americans since the early 1700’s.

Check out these great clipart images from iCLIPART.com for class projects, handmade Valentine's, and adding that personal to touch to your gifts or cards: 
Valentine Clipart




Despite some of the difficulties associated with Valentine's Day in schools, parents and teachers have continued to carry on the tradition for their children.

It can be hard for children to understand that we should love everyone and that there are different kinds of love. Making it clear Valentine's Day can be about other types of relationships is helpful. Love isn't equal in the world. We all love different people differently and that's okay, and acceptable.  I think that as long as Valentine's Day cards are portrayed more of a friendship or caring type of thing rather than love love, then I think that helps.

If you are one of the many people who dislike the holiday because perhaps you're currently single or recently went through a bad breakup. Here are some ideas to help pass the day:

     * Stay away from social media

* Treat yourself to a movie 

    * Treat yourself to a manicure

      * Take your mom out to dinner

"If I could choose to have one superpower, 

I would want to be able to make everyone love everyone"  

- Betsey Johnson

iCLIPART.com Image ID #'s:
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January 2019 - Tips to Make Life a Little More Organized

"A time to say goodbye and a time to say hello. A time to bid farewell and a time to look forward. A time to let go and a time to learn new things, that is what happens when the New Year rings in." 
- Catherine Pulsifer

I've put together some simple tips to make life a little more organized.

Some might look at them as "resolutions" but I think it makes good sense, year round, to get a little more organized from time to time.



1. One in - two out rule!

This time of year is perfect for this rule.
For each new item you received as a gift or purchased for the home, find two things around the house that you don't use or need and get rid of it! This can apply to any time of the year but this time of year is great for reducing your holiday decorations and décor anything you didn't use this year, you probably won't use next year.

Remember to donate or create a yard sale bin - if you price them now, you just have to pull it out when you're ready to have the yard sale.

2. Labels

If you have a hard time getting family members to put things where they belong, labels are a great way to organize and help family members keep things organized.  Shelves, boxes and totes are great places to add labels. It makes it easier for putting things away and for finding them later.


Check out these great tags and labels from iCLIPART.com : TAGS AND LABELS




3. Schedule

To make organizing easier, especially for the kids helping out, make a schedule of when you do what:

Laundry is Thursday nights; bathrooms are Saturday mornings; trash is Tuesday nights etc.

Even if you get off track throughout the year, a posted schedule makes it easier to get back to it.




4. Make time for YOU!

If you find time to be good to yourself, you will benefit in all areas of your life. You are no good to family, friends and co-workers if you are run down. Make time for you as part of your "organizing".

“Caring for your body, mind, and spirit is your greatest and grandest responsibility. It's about listening to the needs of your soul and then honouring them.”

- Kristi Ling

iCLIPART.com contains over 8 million royalty-free clipart images, photos, web graphics, animations, fonts and sounds. Subscribe today and receive access to this amazing collection!

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