Easily Create Custom Icon Graphics for PowerPoint Slides, App Development, Advertising Designs, Websites, Landing Pages, and More
Marketers and business owners know that aesthetics are critical in making a strong impression on customers, investors, and team members.
Poorly designed websites and mismatched powerpoint slides won’t build confidence. From social media posts to slide decks, having visuals that are tailored to your brand can significantly enhance engagement, trust, and professionalism.
But it can be tricky if you don’t have icons that match your brand guidelines, presentation theme, or the overall look you are going for.
Creating custom icons doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive, or time-consuming. This guide will show you how to make custom icons, starting with over 7 million high-quality icons that you can customize easily to fit your needs.
Whether you’re working on pitch decks, advertising designs, UI/UX interfaces, or data visualizations, this post will walk you through the process of making and customizing icons to help you elevate your visuals, strengthen your brand identity, and ultimately, save time and resources.
Is It Worth It To Customize Icons?
Short answer: Yes.
When visuals are designed to be consistent, cohesive, and aligned with your brand, they act as a powerful tool to communicate more effectively with your audience. This goes beyond making things look nice – it’s about making a strong enough impression to win confidence and buy-in. Icons, in particular, can play a crucial role in this process.
For marketers, campaigns today span a wide range of platforms—social media, email, blogs, and digital ads—and maintaining visual consistency is key to building and reinforcing brand identity. Marketers, from Social Media Managers to Marketing Directors and CMOs, often face the challenge of creating scalable and adaptable visual systems that maintain consistency across different formats. Whether you’re producing digital campaigns or print collateral, the need for on-brand, professional visuals is constant.
Custom icons offer an affordable and efficient way to ensure that your visual identity remains consistent across all platforms. By customizing icons—changing their colors, adding unique backgrounds, or adjusting their style—you can create visuals that are uniquely yours while maintaining brand continuity. Icons can be used in everything from social media posts to email newsletters, making your content look cohesive and professional, no matter where it’s seen.
Imagine a social media manager running a multi-platform campaign. Instead of hunting for stock images that may or may not fit the brand, they can quickly find and customize icons to match the campaign’s look and feel. By using editable icons, marketers can ensure that their designs are scalable, adaptable, and always on-brand.
On the broader business communications side, Founders, Salespeople, Program Managers, and Department Heads often need to create presentations or reports under tight deadlines, but they don’t always have access to professional design tools or advanced skills. Despite the constraints, these materials need to impress and inform, whether they are pitch decks for investors or KPI reports for leadership.
Custom icons provide a practical solution to these challenges. They can be quickly tailored to match presentation themes, ensuring that the visuals not only look polished but are also reusable across multiple presentations. Whether you’re working in PowerPoint or Google Slides, using custom icons can make your slides stand out and communicate your message clearly.
By modifying colors or adding unique shapes, you can create icons that align with your brand while maintaining a professional look. This saves time and effort while ensuring that your content remains visually consistent across all your communication materials.
How to Make Custom Icons
It’s extremely fast and easy to make custom icons using Noun Project in a few clicks. In short: Once you find the icon that matches your needs, you can change its color, rotate it, or add a background shape in just a couple of clicks.
Whether you’re designing for digital campaigns, presentations, or internal documents, this step-by-step guide will help you create personalized icons that fit your specific needs.
Step 1: Sign Up or Log In to Noun Project
Head over to Noun Project, where you can browse through over 7 million custom icon designs. Signing up is free, and you can explore a wide range of icons that cover everything from social media graphics to UI/UX elements.
Step 2: Search for Icons Based on Your Needs
Once logged in, use the search bar to find icons that match your project. For marketers, this might include icons for specific advertising designs, while business communicators may be looking for icons to use in PowerPoint presentations or Google Slides.
Search terms like “technology” or “growth” can help you find exactly what you need. If you’re looking for icons to visualize data or represent specific ideas in a pitch deck, you can search for SVG icons that offer flexibility and high-quality resolution.
Step 3: Customize Your Icons
Once you’ve found the icon you need, you can quickly customize it to fit your specific needs. Your options to customize include:
- Change colors to match your brand’s palette.
- Add background shapes for added emphasis or contrast.
- Adjust rotation or size to fit your layout perfectly.
These customization options are particularly useful for marketers looking to create cohesive visuals across platforms. For example, you can tweak the colors of an icon to match the design of an Instagram post and then reuse the same icon for an email campaign without sacrificing quality or branding.
Step 4: Download Your Custom Icons
Once you’ve customized your icon, you can download it in multiple formats, including PNG icons and SVG icons. PNGs are ideal for quick, easy use, while SVGs offer the flexibility to scale your icons without losing quality, making them perfect for print or large-scale digital designs.
Noun Project offers flexible subscription options, starting at just $3.99/month for unlimited icon downloads. Alternatively, you can download individual icons for a one-time fee of $2.99. This makes it an affordable solution for marketers and business communicators who need high-quality visuals but may not have the budget to hire a designer for every project.
How Custom Icons Can Be Used Across Different Projects
Custom icons aren’t just for social media graphics or presentations—they have a wide range of applications in marketing and business communications. Here are some examples of where customizable icons can be used:
- Slide decks and pitch decks: Create professional and visually engaging slides for presentations.
- Advertising designs: Use custom icons to ensure your ads stand out while maintaining brand cohesion.
- UI/UX designs: Build intuitive, user-friendly interfaces with icons tailored to your brand’s aesthetic.
- Data visualizations and KPI reports: Break down complex information into digestible visuals using icons that represent key data points.
- Internal business content: Make reports, proposals, and plans more engaging with personalized visuals.
- Social media posts: Design eye-catching graphics that capture attention and reinforce brand identity.
The Power of Customization: Why It Matters
Consistency in visual design plays a significant role in building trust with your audience. When all your visuals—whether for marketing campaigns or internal presentations—align with your brand, it communicates professionalism and reliability. Custom icons are an easy way to achieve this consistency without needing a full design team.
Personalized icons give you more control over how your brand is represented. A well-customized icon can bring out the personality of your brand, enhance the aesthetic of your designs, and make your content more engaging. This level of personalization helps foster stronger connections with your audience, making your brand feel more relatable and trustworthy.
For marketers, maintaining this level of visual consistency is essential when running campaigns across different platforms. Custom icons allow you to seamlessly adapt your designs to different formats without losing quality or cohesion. This scalability is invaluable when you need to move quickly from one platform to another while maintaining a consistent look and feel.
For business communicators, the ability to customize icons quickly and efficiently saves time and effort, ensuring that presentations and reports are not only polished but also visually aligned with your brand. This consistency helps build credibility and ensures that your message is communicated clearly and effectively.
Final Thoughts: Unify Your Brand with Custom Icons
Creating custom icons doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. By using Noun Project, you can access millions of icons and customize them quickly and affordably to fit your specific needs. Whether you’re designing social media graphics, presentations, or reports, custom icons can elevate your content, reinforce your brand identity, and help you communicate more effectively.
