Everybody, it seems, wants their Web page to look bright, cheerful, stunning and interesting (everybody except us, that is), sometimes regardless of the download time suffered by dial-up surfers as a consequence. But since great designers are born and not made, would-be Web publishers need a little helping hand. There are plenty of clip-art collections on the market, but these two packages are specifically geared towards the Web.

Web Explosion 20,000 contains, as its name suggests, around 20,000 images for use in Web pages. These are broken down into numerous sections. There are, of course, the usual arrays of buttons - some 10,000 of them - in hundreds of different styles, along with 500 bullets, 750 background tiles, 250 banners, 1,000 dividers, 7,000 clip-art images (many of which will seem familiar to users of some Corel products), 1,000 photographs and 250 textures. The latter are for use in image editing packages for those users savvy enough to create their own graphics files with a common theme. The accompanying manual shows you what all the image files look like, while there is also a cataloguing program supplied on the CD.

The second package is, for us, the more interesting one. Containing around 5,000 files, Web Animation Explosion is a huge reserve of animated GIFs, plus a few ShockWave files, that can be used to enhance a Web page. As with Web Explosion 20,000, there are plenty of buttons, bullets, dividers and banners. But there are also over 1,000 animated cartoons, such as the cute (and possibly obscene) little chap at the bottom of this page. All are easily accessed through the HTML catalogue, so it doesn't take long to find what you're looking for. And if you want to make some adjustments to the supplied images, or create your own, a couple of animated GIF editing tools are provided in the box.

The files in both these packages have been designed for compact size and, therefore, fast download. Although there are some business-related images here, it is likely that home users will get the most out of the two titles, as the images they contain are bright and colourful and many have a mildly humorous theme.

These two royalty-free collections are well-catalogued and provide some handy graphics files for the creation of Web sites by consumers rather than business users. The quality of the supplied images is pretty high, but that is reflected in the pricing. In our opinion, the Web Animation Explosion pack offers the better value for money, since plenty of standard, non-animated clip-art files are available elsewhere.