Icons in presentations: How to make good choices

Icons are a fantastic and versatile way of making your presentations more visually engaging, helping you tell your story by replacing monotonous bullet points, or integrating with illustrations and photography. However, icons can also end up being at best decorative or at worse distracting when not used carefully. Simply searching random words and picking the first icon you see is tempting when you’re in a rush, but, with a few easy changes, you can make sure that your icons help, and not hinder, when you tell your story.

We’ve assembled a few simple tips and tricks that can help you get the most out of icons for your presentation.

What do my icons represent?

Let’s start by thinking about why something as simple as an icon can be so difficult to get right. When you really drill into it, icons are miniature illustrations that represent a notion or short piece of text that they either replace or are placed next to. Icons are often visually very simple, and so they’re normally used to represent a single object, concept, or idea. This means your icon leaves out most of the information in a sentence that it represents, so this means you have a decision to make: what part of the story do you represent and what do you leave out?

Let’s take a look at an example. In the sentence “The woman enjoys working out” there are several words that you could choose for your icon to represent. The bottom line is this: the part of the information you choose to represent with your icon will alter the emphasis and, thereby, how your audience perceives your message. For example, if your main message is about the enjoyment of working out, rather than the person doing so being a woman or activity being a workout, then you would choose an icon that represents enjoyment, such as a thumbs-up. Alternatively, if the main message is that the specific activity being enjoyed by the woman is a workout, then you would choose an icon that a workout, such as a dumbbell.

Two examples of a sentence being represented by one of three icons — with each icon placing the emphasis on a different part of the sentence.

How do I make my icon lists consistent?

But that’s just when we’re dealing with a single icon on its own… Something we see a lot in slide design is using a list of icons to make something more visually ‘interesting’. Such ‘sets’ of icons are where icon choice becomes extra important.

When selecting icon sets, you should aim to choose a single word class (or part of a phrase) that all your icons should illustrate. If you choose a jumble of word classes, such as the noun for one icon and the verb for another, instead of representing a cohesive list where your audience can see the connections in your content, it instead comes across as disjointed, and makes your points very difficult to remember.

By letting all icons in a set illustrate the same parts of the sentences (e.g. the verbs or the nouns) they represent, your message stays clear and your audience has a smoother journey through the content.

How do I make my icon design consistent?

Lastly, icons can come in different levels of complexity, where more complex ones are usually combinations of individual icons or miniature illustrated scenes with multiple components. As humans are drawn to visual complexity, choosing icons that vary in complexity will not just imbalance your points and suggest that some are more important than others, but actively encourage the audience to look at some and not others.

Making sure your icons have the same level of complexity will help to balance both your visuals and the emphasis on your content.

That’s why it’s important to make sure all icons visible in one go have a similar level of complexity, not to mention that on a design level consistent icons look far more polished and professional.

By actively choosing which word class to represent with your icon(s), doing so for all icons in a particular set, and ensuring a similar level of complexity, you can take your presentation game to the next level!

Putting it all together

Let’s take a look at an example. We start off with simple text — in this case, a list of three benefits associated with wearing a particular running shoe. We might visually enhance this list by choosing an icon for each bullet point — trying to keep a similar level of complexity across the icons and ensuring that they represent the same part of the copy (i.e. speed/injury/off-road).

We could stop here but, to go even further, we can integrate each bullet point and associated icon with a carefully chosen image that helps to illustrate our points further and really bring them life.

If this was a part of a presentation, we could finish things off by letting each bullet point and icon appear on a click alongside the talking track covering that particular point, to make our story as impactful as possible.

Choosing appropriate icons can help spruce up an uninviting list to showcase what you’re trying to say, while integrating your text and icons with visuals such as illustrations or photography can really bring your story to life.

Feeling inspired and want to create your very own custom icons? Check out our blog how to customise presentation icons in PowerPoint. Or, to learn more about visual storytelling in general, take a look at our blog on how to create visual presentations and eLearning.