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If your boss doesn’t like your icons… they’re probably too big and too dark.

Just like all your graphs, maps, and diagrams, your icons deserve some TLC, too.

Icons can get cartoonish or steal the show if they’re not formatted well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIPNZeNS_d8

What’s Inside

  • 0:00 Intro
  • 0:31 This Case Study
  • 1:47 Smaller Icons
  • 2:14 Colored or Gray Icons
  • 2:37 Review of the 4 Options
  • 3:10 How to Insert New Icons
  • 3:33 The Icon Menu in Word
  • 4:21 Editing the Default Icons
  • 5:26 Special Guest

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] Your icons might be too big or too dark. In this video, I’m going to show you a few variations side by side so you can sit back and compare. And at the end, stick around if you’d like a how to tutorial, because I’m going to show you how to get started with icons that are built right inside of good old Excel and PowerPoint and Word.

I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz On The Go, the series where I make quick tutorials for you as I’m racing around between my conferences and consulting and podcasts and blog posts and workshops. And speaking of workshops, I was just giving a half day virtual workshop. And one of the case studies that we looked at from that group looked something like this.

This obviously isn’t their real report, but the report was structured more or less like this. They had the report title right here at the top. They had a couple introductory paragraphs. And then they had looked through their whole full report and pulled out five key highlights. I love using icons like this for highlights.

I [00:01:00] just wanted to fine tune these a little bit and show them a few variations, which I’m going to show to you in a moment. Okay, these obviously aren’t their real icons, but the icons were this size. One by one inch, and this color, filled in black icons. And then below there, they had all the rest of the stuff.

And on the following pages, pages two, three, four, and so on, they had lots of graphs and maps and diagrams and all sorts of other visuals. I worried that these icons were stealing the show. I wanted them to be the main character, but not like the in your face main character. So, hence the variations. Let me zoom out and show you a couple ideas side by side, okay?

The first thing that we played around with was what if we made the icons just a little bit smaller? We go from one by one inch to half inch, so they’re still the main [00:02:00] character, just not so in your face. Okay, look at just the difference in ink, right? Now you can see all the words, you can see the little boxes underneath them a little bit better.

Let me show you a couple more options. What if instead of default black icons, we try either a brand color or gray. You would use your real brand color. I’m using the Depict Data Studio purple right here. So this would look a little bit different, of course, or a light gray.

One by one inch, solid colored black, smaller black, or my personal favorites, brand color or gray. If you ever try icons and your boss is like, I don’t like them. Get them out of there. Remove them. It’s probably because they’re too big and too dark. Nobody likes icons that are [00:03:00] too big and too dark. They almost look cartoonishly big.

So try making them smaller, try making them a brand color, or try making them lighter. In case you’re new to icons, let me give you a quick, quick 101 level tutorial. They’re here. They’re under insert, and then there’s the icons button. You have to be on the latest version of Word to see these though. So if you don’t see the icons button, you’re going to have to go update your Word to get these built in icons.

Insert icons. You click on that. You get the menu. You go through. You enjoy all the nice icons, right? There are filled versions. There are outlined versions. You’re going to pick one or the other. I picked filled. In this case, you want consistency. I wouldn’t do filled outline, filled outline. That would be weird.

There’s also a search bar in case you need it. In real life, I almost never use any of these icons. I usually use these symbols in a lot of my graphs to talk about like, [00:04:00] you know, we met the target, we met the objective, or this thing increased, this thing decreased, or I’ll do numbered lists with these fancy icons.

The numbers with the circle around them. Okay. Insert icons, pick your icon. Let’s pick the barn. Why not? Let’s go with the barn for today. I’m feeling in a barn mood. By default, look, it gives you the size that it gives you. It gives you one by one inch icons and it gives you black. You can edit this. When you first insert the icon, it pulls up the editing features.

You don’t have to do anything special, but in case you’re clicked off, you know, you’re editing this later. All you have to do is. Click on your icon. It’s going to pull up this graphics format tab for you. And in there, you can adjust the fill. You could make it a brand color. These are my theme colors already added into this file, or you could make it a nice gray.

You can also [00:05:00] adjust the size instead of one inch by one inch, maybe do a half inch. That’s typically the size that I pick for Word. Typically for PowerPoint, because PowerPoint is going to be a bigger screen, one inch is typically okay on PowerPoint. I just want you to know you have control over this. You have control over the color and the size.

So you can make intentional design choices and not just stick with whatever Excel gives you or Word gives you by default. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share! Hi baby, what do you see?

More about Ann K. Emery
Ann K. Emery is a sought-after speaker who is determined to get your data out of spreadsheets and into stakeholders’ hands. Each year, she leads more than 100 workshops, webinars, and keynotes for thousands of people around the globe. Her design consultancy also overhauls graphs, publications, and slideshows with the goal of making technical information easier to understand for non-technical audiences.

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