Clip art images are often used in graphics design when creating visually engaging webpages. Unlike photos, clipart images are often cartoonish in appearance and used as icons or symbols. There are those, however, that are photos of famous monuments, holiday scenes and landscapes which can be used either as backgrounds or supporting images for text. Some clipart images are colored while others are created in simple black and white.

Clip art design optimization follows the practice of tagging each image by the keywords most associated with it and placing images in the same category such as Office, Business, Computers, and Household. The images can also be grouped together depending on their type either as photos or icons, or as backgrounds and themes for stationeries and business letters.

Clip art design software often used for designing clip art are Adobe Photoshop (for photos), Inkscape (for Vector Art) and other image enhancement and manipulation tools both coming from Open Source and Commercial technologies. Consequently, clip art designers should be skilled in using such technology to create clip art images that would match what the text would like to convey.

In advertising and graphic design, clip art design is essential in expressing a certain theme to a target audience. Designs that follow a specific emotion or era (such as vintage or trendy) will surely appreciate a mixture of clipart images into the pattern.