Good Looking
Hemera's The Big Box of Art 615,000
J. Kevin Tumlinson

You may have a dozen reasons for needing access to royalty free graphics, but Hemera's got 615K worth of reasons why you'll never need to worry about it. Hemera's Big Box of Art 615,000 is exactly what it claims to be - a really big box of art.

Hemera's collection of images are high quality and conveniently packaged on a ton of CDs, all indexed with a search tool. We put it through the ringer, plugging in key words like "Mayan temple," "empty apartment," heck even "shaved cats." Every keyword brought up SOMETHING, and usually pretty much what we were looking for.

Straight from their web site, here's what the package contains:

• 241,300 vector clip art images
• 10,100 Hemera™ Photo-Objects™ images
• 50,000 raster illustrations
• 35,200 professional color photographs
• 15,000 professional black and white photographs
• 260,200 Web graphics
• 2,000 textured photos
• 500 animations
• 500 PhotoFont textures
• 200 templates for use in bonus software applications

The only real downside to this product is the sheer amount of images to plow through. Searching is remarkably easy, however, since you can enter keywords and refined searches. The images can be saved in a variety of formats, ready to use with any graphic editing suite such as Adobe Photoshop.

Most impressive about the Big Box of Art was the fact that it truly is a huge graphics package. Where other collections advertise thousands of images and deliver only a scant few, supplemented by useless GIFs and clip-art, Hemera's Big Box of Art 615,000 actually brings home useful, beautiful, high-demand graphics. This is a "must have" for web designers and desktop publishers.

You can buy Hemera's Big Box of Art 615,000 on their web site at www.hemera.com. Retail value is around $80.