Saying more with less
I hate presentations with a lot of words. No one reads them. Why bother? I’ve never understood the purpose of filling a slide with a bunch of words that no one is going to read. Most of the time people don’t even look at the words, let alone attempt to read them.
For the past six months I’ve been using PICOL for everything. PICOL (which stands for Pictorial Communication Language, in case you were wondering) is set of over 500 vector icons. It's a free download and you can check it out at picol.org. I’ve used it in decks and animations. I've used it for product labels and logos. I even use it on my resume.
It’s a brilliant resource and a brilliant idea. There's something inherently awesome about trying to create a standard for visual communications. It’s also licensed under the Creative Commons, so you can use it and adapt it however you want to. Because they are all vectors, it’s very easy to combine different icons together.
One of my new goals is to make a presentation that has no words at all. Or perhaps a blog made purely out of pictograms.
