There's an Icon for That!

As someone who develops presentations and reports for a living, I am a heavy user of icons. My feeling is, why use a standard bullet when the bullet itself could be playing a part in the communication? So while I use a fair amount of bullets, when it comes to important sections and talk points icons are where it's at.

As written-up in earlier reviews, my presentation AI of choice is beautiful.ai which does an amazing job of easy and intuitive design.  One of the more powerful aspects of Beautiful.ai is the icon search function. Many of its templates have a standard icon, but a quick click and you can replace the icon. More importantly, just as you can do an image search, you can do an icon search for just the right icon. Up until very recently, this kind of custom icon development required a designer to come up with these in the form of Vector illustrations. Not any more (sorry designers).

But even beautiful has a limited number of icons.  The primary benefit of this is that they are all made to the same scale and line weight so are completely interchangeable.  But there are some words, thoughts and concepts that are infrequent, ambiguous or esoteric enough that a deeper search is needed.  That's where TheNounProject comes in! (https://thenounproject.com/). With over 5 million searchable icons on file, and an AI "brain" to understand what it's looking for, there should always be an icon for that.

I started with a logical ask for my first icon: "AI". TheNounProject offers up a huge number of icons in varying styles and line weights.  To continue the point I asked for "machine learning". Here are two of each:

What about a relatively conceptual word like "Leadership":

How about a technical term like "QA" (Quality Assurance).  Here, I like the fact that the AI is able to understand that the term is widely applicable but has particular application in heavy industry/manufacturing but also, specifically, software (finding bugs!):

Speaking of "industry", this term is sometimes interchangeable with "Category", so taking a crack at these (two of each):

A little work may be needed where the weight or style of multiple icons may not be consistent.  But it's such an easy search that this can likely be avoided by seeking similar icons across categories.

The primary/theme icon for this blog post was the search term "Marketing"! 😁