icons Archives | PowerPoint Tips Blog

Use icons to create a list

January 3, 2022 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

Research shows that people pay more attention to images than to text, but sometimes you want people to focus on the text, not on an elaborate or complex photo.

A nice compromise is to use icons and they are VERY common on slides these days. PowerPoint 365 includes icons in its collection of images (choose Insert> Pictures> Stock Images and click the Icons tab), and you can find icons in lots of other places, as well.

One simple way to use an icon is to put it in place of a bullet point, as you can see here:

Make icons bigger!

[Read more…]

Inserting icons in PowerPoint 365

April 28, 2017 by Ellen Finkelstein 13 Comments

If you have PowerPoint 365, by now you should have a major new feature, icons. Icons are vector files, just like PowerPoint drawing objects are, so you can resize them and they never get pixelated — unlike bitmap images such as JPGs and PNGs.

Let’s talk about whether you have this new feature, what you can do with icons, and why you might want to use them.

Do you have PowerPoint 365?

You have PowerPoint 365 if you see this when you choose File, Account. That means that you pay monthly instead of 1-time. The advantage is that you get new features pretty much every month. In addition to icons, some of the major new features in the past few months are:

Morph: Interpolating animation
Designer: Slide layout suggestions when you insert an image or bulleted text
QuickStarter: Gives you research and design suggestions when you choose a topic
SVGs: You can insert SVG files (also a type of vector file)
Zoom: Automates the creation of a menu summary slide that uses a zoom animation to link to other slides
Ink highlighter: Lets you highlight text, just like you can in Word

In informal polls I have taken, about 20% of users have PowerPoint 365. That percentage will grow significantly, I believe.

At the end of this post, I give some options for icons if you don’t have PowerPoint 365.

Why use icons?

Icons are VERY popular these days in 2D design. You seem them a lot on websites and on mobile devices, but also in other marketing materials. Icons may take the place of text labels or be included along with labels.

They help organize a page or a slide, giving the audience or reader a clearer understanding of complex material.
Icons are usually minimalist, so they look modern. Often they are one color and many are gray or black.
Because they are vector images, you can resize them without that grainy look.

How do you add icons in PowerPoint?

To add icons, choose Insert, Icons. Then the Insert Icon dialog box opens where you can select the icons you want. You can scroll down or choose a category. You can select multiple icons at a time. Here you see the People and Technology and Electronics categories.

What can you do with icons?

When you select an icon on a slide, the Graphics Tools Format tab appears, as you see here.

Basically, you can do everything with icons except ungroup and use the Merge Shapes commands on them. Here’s a 6-second video of some animation I created showing the concept of people leaving their department bubbles and reaching out to others. I used this slide in a training webinar I gave on animation techniques that help audiences to understand and remember concepts.

What if you don’t have PowerPoint 365 yet?

You can use another vector format, especially WMF and EMF files. Or you can create your own icons in PowerPoint. Here’s are some other blog posts and resources for icons:

Icons are hot now–how to make, get, and use icons

Create your own graphics and icons for PowerPoint: Part 1–Using Clip Art

Create your own graphics and icons for PowerPoint: Part 2–Creating line art from scratch

Recently, Microsoft withdrew support for one type of vector file, EPS. They did this because EPS files can contain scripts and were actively being used to infect computers. Here’s more information.

Are you using icons?

Have you noticed the icon trend? Are you using more icons? Where to you find them? Leave a comment and please share this post with others using the Share icons.

Learn easy principles and techniques that designers use. “Slide Design for Non-Designers” shows you, step-by-step, how to easily get the results you want. Plus bonus theme, template, sample slides, and 5 short video tutorials to make implementing the principles easy.Updated for PowerPoint 2016/365. Learn more at http://ellenfinkelstein.com/pptblog/slide-design-for-non-designers/

Icons are hot now — how to get, make, and use icons

November 8, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

Iconography is hot in design now. Here is an example from one of my websites.

The above icons are colorful and have some depth to them, but you often see icons that are flat and monochrome. Here’s an example from urbangap.com/urban12/dicembre.

I often see icons that are all gray.

What is an icon and why are icons so popular?

An icon is a graphic used as a symbol for a concept. The idea is that you look at the image and immediately know what it means. In practice, that doesn’t always happen and so the best use of icons is with companion text.

Because our brains remember images better than text, your audience will be more likely to remember the concepts you want to convey with an accompanying image. When you want to convey several ideas or help people remember the structure of your content, icons can help. They are always simple, which can give them an advantage over a photograph which might contain extraneous content. (That explains why you should crop photographs and remove their background when possible.)

Icons are also popular for other reasons: [Read more…]

4 ways to get the right people images

June 30, 2013 by Ellen Finkelstein 5 Comments

A client of mine needed images of people to make his presentation come alive. But he couldn’t find the diversity he needed. And he’s in the field of education, which has many more females than males. I came up with 4 ways to find the people images you need.

Take your own photos

Go around your office and ask people if you can photograph them. That way, you’ll get a representative group. Usually, people are happy to oblige, but give them time to spruce themselves up!

Use silhouettes

Silhouettes are great when you don’t want too much detail. In this way, the audience can imagine the diversity.

Geetesh Bajaj at Indezine.com has a great selection of silhouettes.

Use the search box on Geetesh’s website to search for “silhouette” and you’ll find more. This is a great resource!

Create icons

You can create your own modern icons that can be gender and color neutral. I have a blog post showing one idea here.

Buy photos

If you’re willing to spend some money, you can usually find a wide range of photos that suit your purposes. I like Stock Unlimited for their great selection and reasonable prices.

What techniques have you used to get the people images you want? Leave a comment!

Create clear, iconic illustrations in PowerPoint with (gasp!) clip art

October 1, 2012 by Ellen Finkelstein 8 Comments

I’ve often recommended using photos instead of clip art (line art), but clip art can work well if you know how to choose and use it. In this post, I’ll explain how to choose clip art that won’t look silly and how to modify it to make your point clear.

When you choose line art, you usually want to find WMF images. WMF stands for Windows Metafile and it’s a vector format. This means that it’s defined as lines and curves, not as dots. On the other hand, some line art (and all photos) is in bitmap (also called raster) format, which means it’s made up of dots.

Bitmaps don’t resize well. You’ve probably had the experience of trying to make a photo larger and discovering that it looks fuzzy. On the other hand, WMFs, when you convert and ungroup them in PowerPoint, resize perfectly, never getting unclear.

How to choose modern-looking line art

So much of the clip art looks like it was created in the 1980’s — and perhaps it was. To find clip art that looks good these days, look for clean, simple lines. Try to find something iconic rather than sketchy.

INSTEAD OF THIS USE THIS

Do you see the difference?

How to use WMF clip art

The great feature of WMF images is that you can convert them to PowerPoint objects and ungroup them. Once you ungroup them, you can delete parts that you don’t want, change their color, and more. Let’s follow the process of choosing and using a piece of clip art. Suppose you want to talk about the need for your organization to grow and expand.

Choose Insert> Clip Art. In the Clip Art task pane, click the Results Should Be drop-down arrow and choose Illustrations. Uncheck all the other options.
Type tree in the Search For text box and press Enter or click the Go button. Lots of Christmas trees come up and if you don’t want to scroll through all of them, add -christmas to your search to remove them.
Hover your cursor over any image to see its specifications. You see the description of the image, who provided it, its size in pixels, the file size and the file format–see the red arrow at the right. You’re looking for WMF images. (Strange but true: You should be able to add WMF to your search terms to limit the results to WMF files, but when I did that, this tree didn’t appear!)
Choose this tree — it’s nice and simple. When you click it, it appears in the middle of the slide.
Right-click it and choose Group> Ungroup.
At the question asking you if you want to convert it to a drawing object, choose Yes, the default.
Usually, you need to ungroup the image a second time, so repeat the process. Now you see all of the components of the tree.
Usually, there’s a blank white box around the border of the image. Click the outermost rectangle and press the Delete key.
Delete the 3 wavy lines. Then delete the 3 green fills. You’ll be left with an image like this. Do you see how clean and clear it looks?
To indicate growth, we’ll duplicate it, enlarge the duplicate, and add animation to fade the small tree into the large tree. This takes advantage of the fact that you can enlarge the image without making it fuzzy.
Drag the image down so that it will have room to “grow.”
Select the tree and press Ctrl + D to duplicate it.
Press the Shift key and drag the top-right handle of the copy to enlarge it. You press the Shift key to keep the image from being distorted horizontally or vertically.
Move the enlarged copy so that its bottom is even with the bottom of the smaller version and so that it is vertically centered over it, like this.
Let’s fade out the small tree and fade in the big one. In PowerPoint 2003, choose Slide Show> Custom Animation to open the Custom Animation task pane. In PowerPoint 2007, click the Animations tab and then Custom Animation button. In PowerPoint 2010, click the Animations tab.
Select the small tree. In PowerPoint 2003 and 2007, in the Custom Animation task pane, click Add Effect> Exit> (More Effects, if necessary)> Fade. In PowerPoint 2010, click the Add Animation button and choose Fade in the Exit section. (If it isn’t there, choose More Entrance Effects.)
Select the large tree. In PowerPoint 2003 and 2007, click Add Effect>Entrance>Fade. In PowerPoint 2010, click the Add Animation button> Entrance> Fade. In the Start text box (in the task pane in 2003 and 2007, on the ribbon in 2010), choose With Previous. In this way, when you click, the small tree will fade out and the large tree will fade in at the same time.
If you want, change the duration of the fade in the Speed text box.

Here’s the slide after the animation has played. Do you like it? Try creating your own iconic graphics in this way.