I recently had the opportunity to talk to the Church lab about Open Humans, and in the course of preparing slides I needed to represent “people” somehow. The standard “person” icon felt irritatingly male-default (the one on men’s bathroom doors), and mixing it up with the stereotyped “dress equals woman” felt like a miserable propagation of gender binary. So I looked for some silhouettes of people (and I looked for them on OpenClipArt, where all artwork is supposed to be public domain).
I found these1 – and they’re better than icons. People, after all, vary. Humans aren’t a bunch of identical rubber stamps.2
You’ll probably think I’m too picky, but I was still dissatisfied. There was only one woman, and she still felt … extra feminized. I mean, it’s not offensive at all, she looks very normal. But the hair, the legs, the shoes… it still felt like a “performance of femininity” and not just “here is a person that happens to be female”.
Recently I saw that Inkscape has a trace tool and thought I could try my hand at making some “real people silhouettes” from real photos. So I searched Flickr and found this CC-BY photo by downstairsdev. From that I made these three figures:
Can you guess which of these are female? (Answer: all of them.3) Chris wasn’t sure if these were female or male when glancing at them. I think we are collectively inured to the exaggerations made by media: men and women aren’t as different as we make them out to be.
I’d like clip art with less gender-exaggeration to be available to all, so I’ve put them on Wikimedia Commons. I’ve marked these as CC0 because I think clip art really shouldn’t expect stuff like attribution.4 The photo was CC-BY (and not CC-BY-SA) so I think this licensing choice is allowed (let me know if I’m mistaken). (Sorry, I’ve requested deletion of the images per Sage’s correction below.)
I also made a nice “man with a cane” silhouette from this photo by ragesoss of his grandfather (going by the title there) but the photo is CC-BY-SA. As a result I’m not really sure what to do with it I’ve shared it with a CC-BY-SA license, but I really wish it could be CC0. Maybe Sage can change the license to CC-BY…. 😉 Thanks to Sage relicensing this, I’m able to share it as CC0.
1: All four were by rejon, links: Person Outline 1, Person Outline 2, Person Outline 3, Person Outline 4
2: Indeed, the fact humans vary — and that their risk preferences vary — is why something like Open Humans should exist. Some participants will be okay with publicly sharing data that others prefer to keep private.
3: If you crank up the curves – or the gamma on your computer – you can see the faces of the silhouetted folks in the original photo.
4: Well, to be fair, I decided to CC0 all my media shared on Wikimedia Commons.
The CC-BY to CC0 conversion is not allowed by that license. What you made is covered by your copyright and the photographer’s. It’s not SA, so you are not required to release the derivative work under the same license; you can do no license at all for the derivative, as long as you credit the photography. But you cannot release the derivative in a way that removes the attribution requirement for the part of it that is covered by CC-BY. (As noted on Twitter, you’re welcome to do CC0 with the silhouette of my grandpa. I think he would have liked that.)
Thanks for the correction, I’ve removed those images from Wikimedia Commons. And thank you for the release, I’ve updated that license on that image to CC0.
You can still license those others CC-BY (with just the photographer credited, if you like) or any other CC license, just not CC0. I agree with you, though, that CC0 is the best thing for clip art.