About
Clip Art Covers are a series of photoshopped images in which iconic cover art illustrations and photographs are recreated in clip art and the Comic Sans font. While the series initially started with album cover parodies, the concept has spread to video games boxes and DVD sets as well.
Origin
On December 13th, 2011, the “Clip Art Covers” Tumblr[3] blog was launched, which features music albums that have been recreated using clip art images. The first post highlighted a clip art version of the 1991 grunge album Nevermind by Nirvana (shown below). Within the next two years, the blog posted over 365 examples from the series.
Spread
On February 16th, 2012, Facepunch Forums[1] member Robbl started a thread calling for other users to submit cover art from films, games or albums that were recreated using clip art images, stock photos and the Comic Sans font. As an example, Robbl provided a clip art version of the cover for the first-person shooter video game Bioshock (shown below, left). On April 21st, 2013, the Aurorashaman Tumblr[5] blog posted a recreation of the Pokemon Blue Gameboy game cover (shown below), accumulating over 19,200 notes in the following three days.
On April 22th, the Gawker Media video game blog Kotaku[4] published an article highlighting several notable examples from the series. On the following day, NeoGAF member sixteen-bit submitted a thread for clip art video game covers[6], which received more than 380 responses in the first 24 hours. Also on April 23rd, Redditor Celeste1492 submitted a Tumblr post to the /r/MassEffect[8] subreddit, featuring a clip art version of the Mass Effect 2 cover (shown below). In the same timeframe, the post gained upwards of 580 up votes and 35 comments.
Notable Examples
Additional examples can be found on Tumblr under the tag “#clipart.”[7]
Search Interest
External References
[2]Reddit – Recreate any game cover using Clip Art and Comic Sans. Hilarious results.
[3]Tumblr – Clipart Covers
[4]Kotaku – Fixing Video Game Box Art With…Clip Art And Comic Sans
fn5, Tumblr – Aurorashaman
[6]NeoGAF – So this meme about recreating cover artwork using only Clipart and Comic Sans
[8]Reddit – Recreate any game film album