As a presentation specialist, I get the honour of visualizing unique content for keynote speakers, companies, teams and individual professionals. The fun in creating (visual) content is the quick improvement that arises when you delete the obvious visuals. The art of image selection is to create unique visuals and make them fit to the speaker’s message perfectly.

When creating presentations, everyone is searching for the perfect image to visualize the message in the most recognisable way, e.g. using well-known metaphors and simple drawings. This is a step in the right direction, but, when poorly chosen, it can also result in disaster.  Visuals trigger our imagination and, therefore, have are more effective than bullet points (see our tutorial about bullet points). But finding the right image to support your message can often be compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Google alone will give you hundreds of thousands hits for keywords like ‘communication’, ‘team’, ‘cooperation’, etc.

Because of a lack of time, and, therefore, a lack of creativity – because creativity takes time! – people often opt for standard images. What we often come across are cliché visuals, because those are often the safe choices that we tend to make.