Photographs, text and data charts are not the only tools you can use to communicate information on screen. Iconography, used correctly, can often massively distill concepts so your audience’s brain immediately “gets it.” Most often, I use iconography for repetitive concepts that can be introduced and explained once, then reinforced each time simply by displaying the icon.
Here are a few slides from a pitch deck that presented 4 research-driven stategies to a client. The bulk of this presentation revolved around these strategies, each slide falling under one of them. Originally, these 4 strategies were not even introduced all together on one slide, and once introduced on a single divider slide, were not referenced again within their section. It was very difficult to keep track of and remember the essence of this pitch. And so I asked my friend Tim (who designed much of this presentation) to create simple icons that were not only introduced at the top of the pitch and on section dividers, but provided running navigation at the bottom left of each slide to indicate which strategy we were on at any moment.
Icons can also be photographic as in this example created by my friend Gideon.
And they’re not just for navigational or organizational purposes. They can stand on their own as complements to text. Take a look at a before and after with icons capabilities slide…
And a consistently designed icon library created as part of a template system…
