Presentation design is time-consuming, especially for executives & professionals. A survey of over 1,000 employees across multiple industries found that, on average, people spend 20 hours a month on PowerPoint. Does this sound familiar? We know what the problem is.
As a presentation design agency, we’re always curious about what takes most of the time in presentation designing. So we instructed our presentation consultants to ask this question in client meetings.
The results were astonishing!
We found that,
Most time isn’t spent on actual slide designing but on finding the right design resources
Additionally, it’s frustrating to find the right resources that fit the brand’s PowerPoint guidelines.
Why?
Because when you’re designing your presentation, you need to find the right tool for the job. You need free stock images and illustrations to help you tell your story, and then you need to find exactly the right ones for your audience. And not just that, if you want to make sure everything looks as good as possible on any device or browser, you also need to keep track of compatibility requirements and make sure your slides look good even on older devices.
Too much to process?
With all the tools and applications out there, it’s hard to know where to start.
But we’ve got you covered! Whether you’re looking for a new tool or want to make sure your current one is working for you, we’ve compiled a list of the best tools out there for making your next presentation look amazing!
1. The Noun Project for Icons
Noun Project features the most diverse collection of icons and stock photos ever. You can download SVG and PNG & Browse over 5 million art-quality icons and photos for your PowerPoint presentations.
At Ink Narrates, our presentation designers use The Noun Project to find icons for the most complex icon concepts.
Pros: A big library of concept-based icons, you can find icons for almost all styles & all presentation concepts.
Cons: If your company’s PowerPoint presentation style demands a certain standard, you’ll find it quite difficult to find the exact style icon. Also, the free icon version can only be downloaded in black/white which you’ll need to upload into PowerPoint and recolor the artwork as per your brand presentation colors.
Here’s their website,
2. Drawkit for free illustrations
DrawKit was founded in 2018, starting as a small collection of 20 free-to-use, hand-drawn UI illustrations. As the site grew, more illustrations were added daily and the catalog expanded to include animations, premium packs, new styles, and modular illustration kits, becoming a go-to resource for illustrations and graphics.
Pros: You can find the latest style illustrations for your presentations which can make your story more compelling and modern.
Cons: The editable & high-quality illustration formats are under pro subscriptions.
Here’s their website,
3. Undraw for illustrations
This one’s our favorite & I’m sure other presentation design agencies love it too.
Undraw has a big library of concept-based illustrations that you can easily download. You can get .svg formats for your PowerPoint presentations and .png formats for blog posts and digital use.
Pros: Wide range of illustrations for versatile topics. There’s an online editor where you can insert your brand colors & it generates the same color illustrations.
Cons: The editor does give brand color illustrations, but some areas of the illustrations need to be color tweaked in PowerPoint which is a big turndown for professional presentation designers. But if you don’t care too much about exact colors, you can use Undraw.
Here’s their website,
4. Unsplash for stock images
Not every company has the budget to create its own brand imagery, so stock libraries like Unsplash are a great way to use high-quality imagery in your presentations. Unsplash is a library of over 3 million free high-resolution images brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
Pros: High quality & conceptual imagery that tells a story & evokes emotions.
Cons: Limited concept availability as compared to paid libraries like adobe stock.
Here’s their website,
5. Pexels for stock images
Pexels provides high-quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable, and also easy to discover through our discover pages. So if you’re looking for a big library of images for your PowerPoint presentations, Pexels is the way to go!
Pros: The Pexels library is quite big and you can find images for almost every concept. For example, if your presentation design concept is ground coffee, you can find at least 4–5 different image variations.
Cons: We at Ink Narrates believe that Pexels image quality and concept visualization is not as good as Unsplash & Adobe Stock. The images are high resolution & good quality but sometimes images need to tell a story rather than just a visual representation. Especially in high-stake PowerPoint presentations like pitch decks, sales decks & event presentations.
Here’s their website,
6. Iconscount for icons & illustrations
Iconscount is a one-stop shop for presentation icons, illustrations, 3D illustrations, Lottie animated illustrations, etc. If you check their website, there’s a small gift icon on top of the website which says “Free Assets”.
If you click that, every day you get new icons & illustrations pack. As they change literally every day, you can download & collect them for your presentations.
Pros: Free asset packs every day to download. Also, there are free libraries where you can choose resources for your PowerPoint presentations.
Cons: All the other stuff is paid & the website isn’t completely free.
Here’s their website,
All in all!
When you’re working on a presentation, you want to make sure that it’s as easy as possible. Everybody likes to have a go-to place for their presentation resources. We’re just like you!
Just make sure when you download icons & illustrations for your PowerPoint presentations, you do them in .svg file format. For images, make sure you download the .png format. And if you haven’t already, we recommend bookmarking these pages so that next time you’re looking for something specific, you can just click on one of the links above and get started.
Are you looking to get your presentations designed by professionals?
Check out our Presentation Design Services.
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