PowerPoint Icons: A Way To Liven Up Virtual Presentations
Long blocks of text, slides filled with bullet points, and no visual elements. If that’s how you’d describe your presentation, it’s time for a change!
Did you know that audiences retain only 10% of information presented verbally? Including visuals can significantly boost that number.
PowerPoint icons are a simple yet effective solution to immediately enhance dull presentations. These graphic symbols represent a specific piece of information, message, or action.
Why Icons Work
1. Beyond Words
Text-heavy slides are the enemy of audience engagement. Our brains can only handle so much information at once.
Since humans are visual creatures, we process visuals much faster and more efficiently than text.
PowerPoint icons also tap into a more primal part of our brain. They trigger emotions, create connections, and spark memory in ways that text alone often struggles to achieve.
2. Universal Language
Icons hold the power to effortlessly bypass language barriers when delivering a message to a global audience. They transcend spoken languages, acting as a universal language understood by people from all backgrounds.
Clear icons speak for themselves. An arrow signifies growth, a lightbulb sparks new ideas. This is especially helpful for diverse audiences.
3. Elegance and Minimalism
Outline icons bring a clean, modern aesthetic, decluttering your slides and focusing attention on what matters. Replacing bulky text boxes with sleek icons is a quick and easy remedy to make your slides breathe. This makes your key points shine through, leaving a powerful and memorable impression.
Sounds like icons are everything, doesn’t it? That leaves us with the question…
Can Icons Truly Replace Text Altogether?
As useful as icons are in simplifying information, they leave your presentation at risk of being oversimplified. As with other graphical representations of content (such as graphs and diagrams,) icons work best when paired with short bits of text that add context.
When used in isolation, icons can be misinterpreted and might require depth, which can be provided by inserting text. So, think of icons as powerful tools to complement your text, not replace it.
Best Practices For Using Icons In Powerpoint
One of the primary reasons for using PowerPoint Icons is that they are more intuitive. They are a replacement of text or words to represent objects or actions. But they are not always the best way to describe data. Below are a few tips for using PowerPoint Icons –
- The icon must evoke its meaning at a glance. It should not engage the user in interpreting it. An example of a good icon is the “trash box” icon. It refers to delete or discard. Therefore, the icons must be functional, which means the audience should immediately relate to them.
- Colors play an essential role in any design. The icon’s colors should not clash with the overall slide look and feel.
- Don’t overdo the icon design. Icons are supposed to be simple and make the slide look minimal.
- Avoid stuffing icons in the slide as too many icons can make the presentation slide cluttered.
Where Do I Find Icons?
Now, you’re probably itching to get started with using icons. So let’s take a look at the three best platforms to find them:
1. Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint comes with a wide variety of free icons. The library consists of icons to serve a variety of needs. Here is how you can download them:
Insert ribbon > Illustrations > Icons
2. Free Resources
There are a lot of resources available on the web that offer Free icons. Flaticon, Icon finder are a few of them.
3. SlideUpLift’s PowerPoint Icons library
SlideUpLift has a vast collection of PowerPoint icons keeping business professionals in mind. It provides standalone icon slides from where you can copy-paste icons for your presentations. The library includes icon sets that can be used for all sorts of purposes, including security & data icons to human silhouette & financial icons.
PowerPoint Icons For Different Uses
Check out different types of PowerPoint icons that can be used to make impactful presentations. This PowerPoint Icons library contains icons to suit a variety of presentation needs. Let’s look at a few examples:
Money PowerPoint Icons
These PowerPoint icons are a set of black and white money-related icons that could be used to illustrate financial concepts like budget and revenue or show sales performance in your presentation.
2. Accomplishment PowerPoint Icons
This set of icons includes symbols like a variety of trophies, awards, and a figure climbing up steps. They are all generic symbols of success, achievement, and growth. You could use these to depict goals, accomplishments, and new ideas.
Get Accomplishment PowerPoint Icons!
3. Target PowerPoint Icons
The Target icons set contains symbols like a dartboard, cross hairs, and an arrow hitting its mark. These are generally used to illustrate goals, objectives or a specific aim. You could also use it to show the importance of targeting a specific audience, market or outcome.
4. Team PowerPoint Icons
This set of icons consists of symbols portraying unity and teamwork. These include a silhouette of a group of people, people holding hands, and a network of people. These can be used to demonstrate teamwork, team structures, and roles within the team.
5. Editable Sales Icons
This set of icons is related to sales and can be used to represent sales data, trends, and more with the help of symbols like dollar signs, charts, and graphs.
Get Editable Sales Icons!
Example Of Icons In Presentations
Icons can turn a simple presentation into an attractive one. The correct use of PowerPoint Icons is very important.
The example below shows you how effective use of PPT icons can transform the entire presentation.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, presentation Icons help you categorize the content on the slide into smaller chunks of information, making it easier for your audience to read, interpret, and absorb it. Therefore, we would recommend using icons to enhance the quality of your presentation strategically.
If you don’t wish to scour the web to find the right templates, we’ve got some good news! You can download our PowerPoint Templates from within PowerPoint with SlideUpLift PowerPoint Addins.
About SlideUplift:
SlideUpLift is an online platform to help professionals make compelling presentations using principles of vision science and storytelling. The platform contains an online library of pre-designed presentation templates that can be used across industries and functions.
Check out our library of PowerPoint templates that can be downloaded for free with our trial membership. Downloading the editable template, filling it in with content, and building world-class presentations is possible with just a few clicks!
