Visuals often do a faster and better job explaining what you mean than do words. This is very useful if you have to communicate complicated ideas. But what to do when making visuals is precisely what you find complicated?
In that case you can let The Noun Project do the dirty work! This is a website where you can find and download all kinds of icons, quickly and easily. They got a great deal of them, see:
The Noun Project has five advantages that make it such a nice image library:
- You can find (almost) everything. Dozens of different petri dishes, customer services and Parliaments, for example. You can find something for almost any ‘noun’.
- From inspiration till end products. You can download all visuals fully editable (in vector format). Or do you rather want to make your own visuals? Then you’re bound to get a lot of inspiration here, for all possible directions.
- The rights are free, or cheap and easy to pay. Some of the icons are free to use. Others are free provided that you mention the source, or ¢1.99 without mentioning the source. This small fee allows hundreds of designers from over the world to keep adding more and better icons.
- The visuals are easy to combine. Visuals on The Noun Project are square, black/white and styled as icons. That’s why you can mix or use them together, even if they come from different designers.
- It is easy to adjust the visuals. You can get all the icons in a standardized vector format (.svg). Hence you can adjust them all in the same, simple way. You erase a part, change the color here or there, or enlarge the image to the size that you need. And all this without lowering the quality.
We often use The Noun Project, and happily so. Perhaps you will do so too for your next visual?
Stijn is director, trainer and advisor at Analytic Storytelling. We help people to make content-driven stories. That is: clear and compelling communication on complex content.