Clip Art Covers

2011Photoshop / image parodydead

Also known as: Clipart Covers · Clip Art Album Covers

Clip Art Covers is a 2011 image-parody meme where creators recreate album covers and video game box art using only clip art graphics and Comic Sans font.

Clip Art Covers is an image editing meme where people recreate iconic album covers, video game box art, and DVD artwork using nothing but clip art graphics and the Comic Sans font. The trend started with a dedicated Tumblr blog in December 2011 and spread to forums like Facepunch and NeoGAF by 2013, where it picked up significant traction in the gaming community. The humor comes from the obvious gap between polished professional artwork and its deliberately crude clip art recreation.

TL;DR

Clip Art Covers is an image editing meme where people recreate iconic album covers, video game box art, and DVD artwork using nothing but clip art graphics and the Comic Sans font.

Overview

Clip Art Covers follow a simple formula: take a well-known piece of cover art and rebuild it from scratch using only stock clip art images, basic graphics tools like MS Paint, and the Comic Sans typeface3. The results are intentionally terrible looking, but the fun is in how closely the creator manages to match the original composition with such limited tools. A Nirvana album cover's swimming baby gets replaced with a generic clip art infant. A first-person shooter's brooding protagonist gets swapped for a stick figure holding a pixelated gun. The worse it looks, the better it works2.

The meme spans multiple media categories. While it started with music album art, it quickly grew to include video game box art, movie posters, and DVD covers3. The Comic Sans font is a non-negotiable ingredient. Part of the joke is that Comic Sans is already considered the most reviled typeface in design circles, and slapping it onto a recreation of serious artwork makes the whole thing feel even more absurd1.

On December 13, 2011, someone launched the "Clip Art Covers" blog on Tumblr, dedicated entirely to music albums recreated with clip art3. The very first post was a clip art version of Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the landmark 1991 grunge album whose original cover features an underwater photograph of a baby reaching for a dollar bill on a fishhook4. Over the next two years, the blog churned out more than 365 examples covering albums across genres3.

The Tumblr blog cultivated a small but dedicated following. One post featuring a clip art ouija board drew a comment about Comic Sans being "worse than a demon," which the blog operator highlighted as exactly the kind of reaction that made the project worth doing1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr
Creator
Unknown
Date
2011
Year
2011

On December 13, 2011, someone launched the "Clip Art Covers" blog on Tumblr, dedicated entirely to music albums recreated with clip art. The very first post was a clip art version of Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the landmark 1991 grunge album whose original cover features an underwater photograph of a baby reaching for a dollar bill on a fishhook. Over the next two years, the blog churned out more than 365 examples covering albums across genres.

The Tumblr blog cultivated a small but dedicated following. One post featuring a clip art ouija board drew a comment about Comic Sans being "worse than a demon," which the blog operator highlighted as exactly the kind of reaction that made the project worth doing.

How It Spread

The concept jumped from Tumblr to forums on February 16, 2012, when Facepunch Forums member Robbl created a thread asking users to submit their own clip art recreations of covers from films, games, and albums. Robbl kicked things off with a clip art version of the BioShock cover. The thread used clip art, stock photos, and Comic Sans as the required ingredients.

The real breakout happened in April 2013. On April 21, the Tumblr blog Aurorashaman posted a clip art recreation of the Pokémon Blue Game Boy cover that racked up over 19,200 notes in just three days. The next day, April 22, Kotaku published an article spotlighting the trend, noting that it had "started with album covers" but had "jumped pretty swiftly to video games" across Tumblr and various forums. Kotaku pointed readers toward the Tumblr tag and an active NeoGAF thread as the best places to find examples.

On April 23, NeoGAF member sixteen-bit started a dedicated thread for clip art video game covers that pulled in more than 380 responses within its first 24 hours. That same day, Redditor Celeste1492 posted a clip art Mass Effect 2 cover to the r/MassEffect subreddit, where it picked up over 580 upvotes and 35 comments.

How to Use This Meme

Making a Clip Art Cover is straightforward:

1

Pick a famous cover — album artwork, video game box art, or a movie poster that people will instantly recognize.

2

Find clip art equivalents — search for stock clip art images that roughly match the elements in the original. A soldier becomes a stick figure with a gun. An ocean becomes a blue rectangle with a wave.

3

Rebuild the composition — arrange the clip art pieces to mirror the original layout as closely as possible. The closer you match the positioning, the funnier the contrast.

4

Add text in Comic Sans — replace all title text and logos with Comic Sans. This is the signature detail that ties the whole format together.

5

Keep it deliberately crude — the charm is in the effort-to-quality ratio. People appreciate when you clearly tried hard to match the original while being limited to terrible tools.

Cultural Impact

Kotaku's coverage in April 2013 brought the trend to a mainstream gaming audience. The format tapped into a broader internet fascination with Comic Sans as a cultural punching bag and with clip art as a relic of early computing aesthetics. The meme also reflected the growing popularity of "bad on purpose" creative exercises online, where the constraint of using terrible tools to recreate something professional became its own art form.

The Tumblr blog's sustained output of 365+ posts over two years gave the meme a stable home base that kept it alive longer than most one-off image fads. The format's jump from music to gaming to film showed how adaptable the core concept was.

Fun Facts

The original Tumblr blog posted its first clip art cover of Nirvana's *Nevermind*, one of the best-selling albums of all time with over 30 million copies sold worldwide.

The NeoGAF thread got 380+ responses in a single day, making it one of the faster-growing creative threads on the forum at the time.

Comic Sans wasn't just a stylistic choice for laughs. The font is widely considered one of the most disliked typefaces among designers, so pairing it with clip art doubles down on the "design nightmare" aesthetic.

The Pokémon Blue clip art cover was the single most viral individual post from the trend, hitting 19,200 Tumblr notes in three days.

Derivatives & Variations

Video game box art covers

— The biggest spinoff, popularized through NeoGAF and Reddit, where users focused specifically on recreating game packaging[2].

Film and DVD cover variants

— The Facepunch Forums thread from 2012 explicitly included film covers alongside albums and games[3].

Tumblr tag community

— A broader "#clipart" tag on Tumblr collected examples beyond the original blog, creating a loose community of contributors[3].

Frequently Asked Questions

Clip Art Covers

2011Photoshop / image parodydead

Also known as: Clipart Covers · Clip Art Album Covers

Clip Art Covers is a 2011 image-parody meme where creators recreate album covers and video game box art using only clip art graphics and Comic Sans font.

Clip Art Covers is an image editing meme where people recreate iconic album covers, video game box art, and DVD artwork using nothing but clip art graphics and the Comic Sans font. The trend started with a dedicated Tumblr blog in December 2011 and spread to forums like Facepunch and NeoGAF by 2013, where it picked up significant traction in the gaming community. The humor comes from the obvious gap between polished professional artwork and its deliberately crude clip art recreation.

TL;DR

Clip Art Covers is an image editing meme where people recreate iconic album covers, video game box art, and DVD artwork using nothing but clip art graphics and the Comic Sans font.

Overview

Clip Art Covers follow a simple formula: take a well-known piece of cover art and rebuild it from scratch using only stock clip art images, basic graphics tools like MS Paint, and the Comic Sans typeface. The results are intentionally terrible looking, but the fun is in how closely the creator manages to match the original composition with such limited tools. A Nirvana album cover's swimming baby gets replaced with a generic clip art infant. A first-person shooter's brooding protagonist gets swapped for a stick figure holding a pixelated gun. The worse it looks, the better it works.

The meme spans multiple media categories. While it started with music album art, it quickly grew to include video game box art, movie posters, and DVD covers. The Comic Sans font is a non-negotiable ingredient. Part of the joke is that Comic Sans is already considered the most reviled typeface in design circles, and slapping it onto a recreation of serious artwork makes the whole thing feel even more absurd.

On December 13, 2011, someone launched the "Clip Art Covers" blog on Tumblr, dedicated entirely to music albums recreated with clip art. The very first post was a clip art version of Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the landmark 1991 grunge album whose original cover features an underwater photograph of a baby reaching for a dollar bill on a fishhook. Over the next two years, the blog churned out more than 365 examples covering albums across genres.

The Tumblr blog cultivated a small but dedicated following. One post featuring a clip art ouija board drew a comment about Comic Sans being "worse than a demon," which the blog operator highlighted as exactly the kind of reaction that made the project worth doing.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr
Creator
Unknown
Date
2011
Year
2011

On December 13, 2011, someone launched the "Clip Art Covers" blog on Tumblr, dedicated entirely to music albums recreated with clip art. The very first post was a clip art version of Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the landmark 1991 grunge album whose original cover features an underwater photograph of a baby reaching for a dollar bill on a fishhook. Over the next two years, the blog churned out more than 365 examples covering albums across genres.

The Tumblr blog cultivated a small but dedicated following. One post featuring a clip art ouija board drew a comment about Comic Sans being "worse than a demon," which the blog operator highlighted as exactly the kind of reaction that made the project worth doing.

How It Spread

The concept jumped from Tumblr to forums on February 16, 2012, when Facepunch Forums member Robbl created a thread asking users to submit their own clip art recreations of covers from films, games, and albums. Robbl kicked things off with a clip art version of the BioShock cover. The thread used clip art, stock photos, and Comic Sans as the required ingredients.

The real breakout happened in April 2013. On April 21, the Tumblr blog Aurorashaman posted a clip art recreation of the Pokémon Blue Game Boy cover that racked up over 19,200 notes in just three days. The next day, April 22, Kotaku published an article spotlighting the trend, noting that it had "started with album covers" but had "jumped pretty swiftly to video games" across Tumblr and various forums. Kotaku pointed readers toward the Tumblr tag and an active NeoGAF thread as the best places to find examples.

On April 23, NeoGAF member sixteen-bit started a dedicated thread for clip art video game covers that pulled in more than 380 responses within its first 24 hours. That same day, Redditor Celeste1492 posted a clip art Mass Effect 2 cover to the r/MassEffect subreddit, where it picked up over 580 upvotes and 35 comments.

How to Use This Meme

Making a Clip Art Cover is straightforward:

1

Pick a famous cover — album artwork, video game box art, or a movie poster that people will instantly recognize.

2

Find clip art equivalents — search for stock clip art images that roughly match the elements in the original. A soldier becomes a stick figure with a gun. An ocean becomes a blue rectangle with a wave.

3

Rebuild the composition — arrange the clip art pieces to mirror the original layout as closely as possible. The closer you match the positioning, the funnier the contrast.

4

Add text in Comic Sans — replace all title text and logos with Comic Sans. This is the signature detail that ties the whole format together.

5

Keep it deliberately crude — the charm is in the effort-to-quality ratio. People appreciate when you clearly tried hard to match the original while being limited to terrible tools.

Cultural Impact

Kotaku's coverage in April 2013 brought the trend to a mainstream gaming audience. The format tapped into a broader internet fascination with Comic Sans as a cultural punching bag and with clip art as a relic of early computing aesthetics. The meme also reflected the growing popularity of "bad on purpose" creative exercises online, where the constraint of using terrible tools to recreate something professional became its own art form.

The Tumblr blog's sustained output of 365+ posts over two years gave the meme a stable home base that kept it alive longer than most one-off image fads. The format's jump from music to gaming to film showed how adaptable the core concept was.

Fun Facts

The original Tumblr blog posted its first clip art cover of Nirvana's *Nevermind*, one of the best-selling albums of all time with over 30 million copies sold worldwide.

The NeoGAF thread got 380+ responses in a single day, making it one of the faster-growing creative threads on the forum at the time.

Comic Sans wasn't just a stylistic choice for laughs. The font is widely considered one of the most disliked typefaces among designers, so pairing it with clip art doubles down on the "design nightmare" aesthetic.

The Pokémon Blue clip art cover was the single most viral individual post from the trend, hitting 19,200 Tumblr notes in three days.

Derivatives & Variations

Video game box art covers

— The biggest spinoff, popularized through NeoGAF and Reddit, where users focused specifically on recreating game packaging[2].

Film and DVD cover variants

— The Facepunch Forums thread from 2012 explicitly included film covers alongside albums and games[3].

Tumblr tag community

— A broader "#clipart" tag on Tumblr collected examples beyond the original blog, creating a loose community of contributors[3].

Frequently Asked Questions