You remember that old school project from 2003? The one with the wavy WordArt and the cartoon guy sitting at a desk? We all used it. But nobody really looked at it. Most people just saw a library of generic graphics meant to spice up a bland flyer. In reality, the world of digital illustration in the 90s and early 2000s was a playground for bored, highly skilled artists. They were tucked away in cubicles at Microsoft and Corel, and they were leaving little gifts for us. Clip art easter eggs aren't just myths; they are the artifacts of a very specific era in software development when things were a lot less "corporate" than they are now.
It’s weird. Today, every pixel in a Google Workspace icon is focus-grouped to death. Back then? A lone illustrator could hide their kid’s name in the shadow of a house or draw a tiny, barely visible self-portrait in the reflection of a pair of sunglasses.
The Secret Life of Vector Files
When we talk about these hidden gems, we aren't talking about grainy JPEGs. Most classic clip art was vector-based. This is important. Because vectors are made of paths and points, you can zoom in forever without losing quality. This gave artists a massive canvas to hide things in plain sight.
Take the classic "Executive" or "Businessperson" graphics. In the mid-90s, Microsoft’s Clip Gallery was the king. There’s a famous example where if you ungrouped the vector components—basically breaking the image into its raw shapes—you’d find things that weren't supposed to be there. In some versions of the "Man at Computer" clip art, the tiny screen actually contained readable text or specific code snippets that the artist was working on at the time. It was a "Kilroy was here" moment for the digital age.
Microsoft wasn't the only one. CorelDRAW was a massive competitor, and their library was legendary for its complexity. They had thousands of images. In some of their more detailed nature scenes, artists would hide their signatures inside the veins of a leaf or the iris of a bird's eye. It wasn't about "hacking" the system. Honestly, it was about pride. They wanted to mark their work in a medium that felt increasingly anonymous.
Why Artists Risked It
Why do it? Boredom, mostly. But also a bit of rebellion.
Imagine drawing 40 different types of "Business Meeting" for six months straight. You’d get a little stir-crazy too. Adding clip art easter eggs was a way to keep the job interesting. There’s a specific instance often cited by vintage software enthusiasts involving a "Cityscape" graphic. If you zoomed into one of the tiny office windows in the background, you could see a silhouette of a person waving. It’s tiny. You’d never see it on a printed page. But it’s there, sitting in the code of the WMF (Windows Metafile) file.
Then you have the "Hidden Mickey" style of eggs. Some illustrators were huge fans of other media. While they couldn't legally include copyrighted characters, they would suggest them through shapes and shadows. It was a game of "catch me if you can" played against the editors who were supposed to be checking these libraries before they shipped on millions of CD-ROMs.
The Famous "Volcano" and Other Legends
There’s a persistent story about a volcano clip art where the smoke supposedly formed the initials of a disgruntled employee. While some of these "disgruntled employee" stories are a bit exaggerated—urban legends of the tech world—many are based in truth. Developers and artists have a long history of hiding credits in "About" screens (like the famous flight simulator hidden in Excel 97), and that culture naturally bled over into the art departments.
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One of the most common types of eggs involves the "family photo."
If an artist needed a "Photo Frame" or "Desk" graphic, they often used their own life as a reference. You’ll find old clip art of a "Generic Family" that is actually a stylized version of the artist’s own wife and kids. It’s a sweet, low-stakes way to immortalize your family in a product that would eventually be installed on nearly every computer on Earth.
How to find them today
- Open an old file: Find a .wmf or .eps file from a 90s era gallery.
- Ungroup the object: Use a vector program like Adobe Illustrator or even the "Edit Picture" function in old Word versions.
- Pull it apart: Move the top layers. Check the backgrounds.
- Zoom in: Look at reflections, shadows, and tiny screens.
The Death of the Digital Easter Egg
It’s harder to find these now. Modern "clip art"—now mostly called "Stock Assets" or "Icons"—is often generated or strictly curated by AI and massive design systems. The individual artist has been replaced by a pipeline. In a 2026 tech environment, everything is lean. Extra vectors mean extra kilobytes, and extra kilobytes mean slower load times for web apps. The "fat" of those old, weird files has been trimmed away.
Also, the legal teams got smarter. Companies realized that hidden messages could be a liability. What if an artist hid something offensive? Or something that looked like a competitor's logo? The "Wild West" era of software ended, and with it, the era of the hidden doodle.
Why We Still Care
It’s about the human touch. When you find a tiny, hidden detail in a piece of software that’s 30 years old, it reminds you that a person made it. It wasn't just a "corporation." It was a guy named Dave who liked his dog or a woman named Sarah who wanted to see if she could sneak a tiny smiley face into a drawing of a telephone.
These clip art easter eggs are digital fossils. They show us what mattered to the people building the foundations of the modern digital world. They weren't just making tools; they were playing.
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Next Steps for Your Vintage Digital Hunt
If you want to go down this rabbit hole, start by scouring "Abandonware" sites for old Corel or Microsoft Office ISO files. Install them in a virtual machine and use the "Insert Clip Art" tool. Don't just look at the image; break it. Right-click, "Ungroup," and start moving pieces. You’ll likely find that the "Generic Office" is a lot more crowded than it looks. Check out the "Smithsonian of Clip Art" projects online—there are several hobbyists currently archiving these files specifically to document the metadata and hidden paths left behind by the original creators.
Look for the "signature" in the shadows. It's usually where the most interesting things are buried.