Category: Content Strategy

Today, the visuals you use in your content often outweighs the text you are presenting.  Without a great visual, you will not have your content read or used.  One of the best sites I like to use is the Noun Project.  It is a great example of crowdsourcing something we all need…graphics we can immediately use on any subject!  It is fun, free to use [for most things] and is a great source of inspiration and useful graphics.  I use it in my blogging, client presentations, and proposals.  My students use it in all of the client coursework at Northwestern.

Here is how it works

The Noun Project started with an ambitious goal.  Create an icon for every Noun in the world.  To accomplish this goal, they opened the project to crowd sourcing.  Aspiring graphic artists could create graphics to submit to the projects.  The best would then be loaded for your use.

When you go to the Noun Project, you need to log-in to get access to the graphics.  On the project site, there are two types of graphics.  Free graphics can be downloaded and used immediately.  While you can just download them, it is good form [and probably good legally] to reference the artist who created them.  I do this under the graphic, in a footnote or at the end of my presentation.  The second type of graphics are those with a charge.  You can pre-buy packages at a very reasonable rate and it allows you much more graphics choices compared to the free version.

On the site, I have found their kits and categories to be very useful tools.  It gets you to subsets of graphics and allows you to consider different options for your content.  I also like to just look at the newer ones.  Often, inspiration can come from a variety of sources so browsing often produces great content results.

Regardless of your content needs, check out the Noun Project.  It’s fun, easy to use and contains great graphics for all of your content needs.  Great stuff for free!

Randy Hlavac is President of Marketing Synergy – a marketing consulting firm specializing in social and integrated marketing.  In addition, Randy teaches social and mobile marketing at Northwestern University and is the author of a new book on social marketing strategies titled:  Social IMC – Social Strategies with Bottom-line ROI.  Randy can be reached at rhlavac@msinetwork.com