This week’s eLearning Heroes Challenge on the Articulate Forums was about creating custom icons for your eLearning courseware. It’s a great project; after all, you want icons that have the appropriate look and feel for your unique course, and even with all the great free resources available on the internet, there might come a time when you can’t find an icon set that’s just right.
And of course, we’re not all artists. So if the thought of creating a custom set of icons sounds daunting to you, let me show you how quick and easy it is using only PowerPoint. We were encouraged to use PowerPoint for this challenge, for maximum shareability of our finished icon sets.
Just insert a shape on a PowerPoint slide. Then format it to your liking using the Quick Styles feature and the Format Shape options on the right-click menu. And if you’ve never explored the various Wingdings sets that come with PowerPoint, this is a great time to do it–there are all sorts of handy characters (telephones, printers, arrows, and much more) in there, just waiting for you to find them. TIP: Don’t settle for just picking a Wingding set and typing a character on your keyboard. You can also hold down the Shift key as you press your keyboard keys to get a whole second level of Wingdings in each character set!
If you’d like to download the icon sets I created in PowerPoint for this challenge to use in your own projects (including instructions on how to make your own), click here: Icons – Andrew Sellon
And here’s a peek at one of the two sets in the download:
