By Andrea Byrnes. Published in In Brief, on Egyptological. 18th July 2012.
Ancient Egyptian Designs and Motifs
CD-Rom and Book (451 Royalty Free Designs)
Dover Publications 2006
ISBN-9780486997612
Introduction
I saw this for sale on special offer in a bookshop and bought it out of curiosity, not for any specific purpose, although I was hoping that it might be useful for sourcing images for use in illustrating articles. It is one in a series of Dover books which come with a CD-Rom.
The book displays a set of 451 set of designs and the CD-Rom contains the image in multiple formats (BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, PICT and TIFF).
The CD-ROm is compatible with both Macintosh and Windows, but please note that in this review I have only tried using it on a Windows 7 laptop.
Content
First, the terms and conditions of use. All the images are royalty-free and can be used free of charge from the CD as long as you include no more than ten in the same publication or project. For permission for additional use you can write to them at a postal address provided in the book. There’s an additional limitation: “republication or preproduction of any illustration by any other graphic service, whether it be in a book or any other design resource, is strictly prohibited.” That leaves plenty of options for most of us.
Next, the designs shown in the book. They are designs, not photographs, and they are great fun rather than high art. You can judge for yourself from the no-more-than-ten examples dotted throughout this review (to fit them all in I’ve inserted them as small images but you can click on them to see larger versions). Sixteen of them are in colour at the end of the book, and the rest are black and white. A lot of them are not particularly useful for accompanying a serious article, but some of them, surprisingly, are. Whilst some of them are obviously invented designs, others are equally clearly accurate representations of objects and tomb scenes, some simple line drawings, others copies of more detailed prints. There’s a good mixture of different designs and styles.
Unfortunately most of them are unaccompanied by captions, and those captions that are provided are both vague and, occasionally, a little dubious (the captions throughout this article are mine). But the point of the book is not to provide a resource for Egyptologists – it’s a resource for designers and if you can bear that in mind there’s still quite a bit that’s useful as well as entertaining.
Each of the images is numbered. This number is also the file number on the CD-Rom, so when you find the images that you want to use, make a note of them, and that’s the number you look for on the CD.
Opening the images from the CD-Rom to edit in image editing software
The next bit is the mildly techy bit – getting your image from the CD into your software.
The book makes it perfectly clear that you don’t need to install the CD-Rom but it does offer you a Setup option which, out of habit, I clicked. This loads a really quite clunky interface called the Dover Design Manager, which turns out to be image editing software that allows you to look through images, but isn’t terribly intuitive. Clicking on the link to a tutorial online resulted in a “Page Not Found” message. So I had a play with it. I figured out how to capture an image and copy it into Adobe Photoshop, but the images were really small. Back to the drawing board.
I next did as the book advised and went into the Images folder itself, which contains a set of sub-folders for the black and white images, organized by image format. Most people will probably usually select JPEGs and GIFs, as these are the two formats used on the web.
Accordingly, I started off with the folder labelled “JPG” and this provided three folders labelled numerically, corresponding to the image numbers in the book. I opened the first of the folders and it displayed thumbnails of the images, meaning that the user can actually navigate through the CD to select images, as well as finding them in the book.
Double clicking one of the JPEG images invoked Photoshop (as it should, as Photoshop is my default image editor). Ditto with the GIFs. Again, the image that appeared, in either JPEG or GIF format, was a very small image, much smaller than the image shown in the book. So then I tried the TIFF and BMP formats. These worked wonderfully, are suitably large and therefore flexible. But you have to convert them to either GIF or JPEG format if you want to use them on the web. PICT files were large but opened in QuickTime Picture Viewer and those in EPS format opened in Adobe Illustrator.
My strategy will be to open the images on the CD-Rom as TIFF files and convert them to JPEG or GIF files in Photoshop (which has a “save for web” option), which is fairly straightforward but still an irritating extra step. In conclusion, how easy this is to use will probably depend on your software and how willing you are to fiddle around with it. It is probably going to be sufficiently useful to me, from time to time, to be worth the fiddle, but I wouldn’t be impressed if I was trying to use it on a regular basis for web work.
The colour images are stored in a separate sub-folder within the Images folder, and are available in a choice of TIFF or JPEG. It’s the same story as the black and white images – the JPEGs are attractive but small and the TIFFs are provided at full size and can be converted. The text on the back of the book states that the coloured JPEGs are 72 dpi and the TIFF formats are 300 dpi. The colours are not always authentic and are somewhat over-saturated (see example below).
You can also pull your images into your image editing software as usual, by clicking Open and navigating to the folder and file that you want on the CD-Rom.
For those struggling, there is a support website, which I haven’t used, but is functioning at the time of writing.
Pulling images from the CD-Rom into Microsoft Word
I also tried pulling the images into Microsoft Word (by clicking Insert and navigating to the image file required). This worked perfectly, pulling in JPEG, TIFF and BMP files without problem (again, the JPEGs were smaller than those shown in the book but the TIFFs and BMPs were fine)
Conclusion
This is the sort of book I will always buy if I see it on special offer (as I did), but I wouldn’t pay full price for it as it doesn’t really meet any of my needs, which are mainly confined to illustrating articles.
Even without the CD-Rom, the book might be a great resource for a designer who is interested in Egyptian themes, or for someone looking at how ancient Egyptian themes have been interpreted in modern times.
The lack of captions or details about the locations of the original objects and scenes may limit its usefulness for some users.
The major downside for me was the need to fiddle around with TIFFs and BMPs because the JPEGs and GIFs were far too small to use. That seems like a very strange strategy, given that I would imagine that one of the most common uses of a book like this would be to source clipart for use on the web.