Know Your Nouns!

If you’re not using The Noun Project, I beg you to remedy that in your next presentation. It is single handedly the most useful tool for creating deck content.

Here’s eight reasons why The Noun Project rocks:

1. Most likely, you think you are not very good at drawing and probably even worse when using a computer.
2. The images are very simplistic, reducing the Signal to Noise Ratio (more about this in a later post).
3. There’s a huge repository of icon images that can really help bring a consistent look and feel to your presentations.
4. They are vector images. Meaning they can scale up to the size of a 3 story banner hanging on the Mascone Conference Center in San Francisco for the 1st #KillingCorporateDecks convention!
5. You can choose the color for the image. This feature is no longer available with the latest update from The Noun Project as the PNG Project Plugin is no longer available. The good news you can have PNG files now direct from The Noun Project.
6. You only have to purchase the images once you’re happy with them in your deck.
7. It’s cheap! A lot of images are free, require an acknowledgement or can be used with no restrictions for only $1.99.
8. The UI is gorgeous and inspires.

If you still need convincing, here’s an example of a slide I built using a few icon images found on www.thenounproject.com. It took about 25 minutes to build the slide. @dscofield uses this as her slide now. After all it was her mantra of “Experiment, Learn, Apply and Iterate.”

Total cost $5.97. #Priceless

Some additional tips when using The Noun Project:

1. Use The PNG Project browser plugin which provides PNG files instead of SVG. No longer required. The Noun Project allows you to download PNG files directly.
2. Be legal with your images. Give credit where credit is due. Pay $ when $ is due.
3. Put links to the original images in your speaker notes. You’ll thank yourself later, trust me.
4. Experiment using the different image color options.
5. Favorite images that you like or use, it will be easier to find them later. This feature will be coming back soon!

Go ahead and start experimenting, learning, applying and iterating with your new found repository of icons.