Fifties Dance Clip Art

Fifties dance clip art can be found in many places on the Internet. While easily available on the web, what you get from an initial search may not be the best thing for your website or publication. Some guidelines and sources to help you get started are never a bad idea.

While the common perception is that fifties dance is the swing dance style that came out of the post-World War II dance halls, the fact is that there were many different kinds of dance popular in the 1950s. Tango pre-dates that decade; so does the foxtrot, the waltz, and some early forms of samba, salsa, and mambo. Ballet was already a fine art by then, and modern dance was establishing a firm basis of movement vocabulary as the dance form came into its own.

So you actually have a wide variety of choices when you want to represent the 50's era of dance. Just make sure that you don't accidentally put up some form of dance that is obviously not from the 50's. These would include:

• Breakdancing
• Country Line Dancing
• Aerial (trapeze) dance
• Fusion or Tribal Bellydance (though Middle Eastern Dance is fine)
• Any ballroom dance with a scantily-clad female
• Disco

You may already have some appropriate clip art on your computer, if you have a robust word processing client such as Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. These both include large clip-art libraries of all kinds of subjects in their content, on all kinds of subjects including fine arts, and in all sorts of styles from line drawings to photographs. Since the 50's style of ballroom dance (elegant and sophisticated) and the joy of swing dance are idealized by many, there are probably a few appropriate images in your program. It's also fairly easy to copy the image with control-C and paste it into another image editor such as Adobe Photoshop to change it more. Best of all, Microsoft in particular has a lot more images available online at their clip-art page.

Other online sources can be a bit trickier for finding good clip art. It's easy enough to google "free fifties dance clip art" and come up with hundreds of sites. The problem is, many of these are not actually going to have good clip art – instead, they have tiny .gif and .jpg files that are not of a high enough quality to use as anything but a chat avatar. In fact, many of those sites get their content from old, outdated versions of word processors. Worst of all, the pages are so crowded with ads it is almost impossible to actually find any kind of good content. Luckily, it's as cheap as a dollar to move into a much higher class of image, via clip art and stock photo sites such as iStockPhoto, where you can get professional quality images for as low as a buck, all licensed for use on your website or publication.

If you are going to use an image on your website, there's a few guidelines to follow:

• Use a jpg or a gif – other image formats such as png may work on some browsers, but will break on others, and also tend to take up a lot of file space.
• Speaking of space, make sure the image is the right size – and that does not mean loading a huge image on a web page and then shrinking it with the mouse. Take the time to "optimize" the image for your web page (a visit to LoveToKnow's Web Design page can help you with that).
• Make sure the image is licensed for use on your web page, especially if you're using it to get any money. You can't just right-click on any image on the web and use it, but sites such as Creative Commons can link you to flickr groups and other places where photographers are happy to let you use their images.

• Photos of Ballet Dancers
• Dance Studio Equipment
• Pictures of Limbo Dancing

• Dance Steps to Thriller
• Popular Line Dances
• Famous Choreographers
• Country Line Dance Steps
• Famous Ballet Dancers

• Ballroom Dance Clip Art
• Free Dance Party Clip Art
• Category:Other Dance Topics