Sheila B Robinson on Being an “Iconic” Presenter! ;-)

Hello! It’s Sheila B Robinson, aea365 Lead Curator and sometimes Saturday contributor with a fabulous and   tool for polishing your presentations!

Great presentations are complemented by great visuals. Using icons on your slides are one way to organize information visually, and direct your audience’s attention to the topic at hand.

There is no shortage of help out there for downloading and even creating your own icons for use in presentations. Want some ideas? Check out Stephanie Evergreen’s blog. Just type “icon” in the search box there and you’ll have the opportunity to read several posts about using and creating icons. In fact, it was Stephanie who turned me on to iconfinder.com, my new favorite free tool!

Lesson Learned: I recently had to create a presentation reporting evaluation results from several data collection points. There was a telephone interview, an online survey, and a paper survey. As I created my presentation, I added icons to each slide – a phone icon, a computer icon, and a paper icon. Using these ensured limited text on each slide, as they eliminated the need for “Phone interview” or “Online survey” to appear on each.

Rad Resource: Try iconfinder.com for all your icon needs! While there is an excellent selection of free icons, they also have a huge selection of low-cost high quality icons. I found prices ranging from $0.48 to $1.98. You can filter your search by price and by license. You can also search specifically for vector graphics, a favorite among graphic artists and presentation creators for their inherent flexibility.

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Rad Resources:  Presentation-Process.com has a great tutorial on creating your own icons in PowerPoint, and Haute Slides features a tutorial  on creating custom icons from clip art.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.