Your Brand Needs Its Own Icon Set (Insert > Icons Isn't It)

Open the Insert tab in PowerPoint, click Icons, and you'll find a library of several thousand clean, simple, perfectly serviceable icons. Every Microsoft 365 subscriber in the world has the same library, which is why the lightbulb, the handshake and the little rocket turn up in so many corporate decks that they've become the modern equivalent of clip art.

The icons themselves are perfectly good. They belong to Microsoft's visual language, though, and your brand has (or should have) one of its own. A brand icon set is one of the most useful things a business can add to its PowerPoint and Word templates, and one of the most overlooked, mainly because nobody's quite sure whose job it is.

What is a brand icon set?

A brand icon set is a library of icons drawn specifically for your business, following consistent rules for grid size, stroke weight, corner treatment, level of detail and colour, so that every icon looks like it came from the same hand. It covers the concepts your business talks about most often (your services, your sectors, your values, the steps in your process) and it's delivered in formats that work inside Office, ideally as vector graphics that recolour with your theme.

Good brand guidelines usually include an icon style. Fewer include the icons themselves, and fewer still deliver them in a way that someone building a deck at 4pm can actually find and use.

Why the stock library makes your decks look generic

The Office icon library has to work for every business on the planet, so it can't lean towards any one of them. The line weights are tuned for general use, the metaphors are the most obvious available (a target for goals, a globe for anything international, etc), and the drawing style is deliberately neutral.

The bigger issue is mixing. A deck built by six people over three months will usually contain icons from the stock library, a few from a free icon website, a handful the marketing team commissioned for the website, and at least one screenshot of an icon pasted from somewhere else entirely. Put together, they look like a scrapbook, and the audience notices the inconsistency even if they can't say what's bothering them.

A brand icon set fixes the mixing problem, because when people have the right icon within easy reach they stop hunting elsewhere.

What makes an icon set feel like it belongs to you

The design decisions are where a brand icon set earns its keep, and they're worth making deliberately.

A single grid and stroke weight. Every icon gets drawn on the same grid with the same line thickness. This sounds like a small thing, and it's the main reason a professional icon set looks cohesive while a collected one never quite does.

A style that echoes the brand. Rounded line ends for a friendly brand, square ends for a more architectural one. Outline icons, solid icons or a two-tone treatment using a primary and secondary colour. The icon style should feel like it's related to your logo and typeface, in the same way your chart style and photography should.

Your metaphors. This is where a custom set does work the stock library can't. If your business talks about "the client journey", the icon for it can reflect how you actually describe that journey. Industry-specific concepts (a particular piece of equipment, a regulatory process, a product category) usually don't exist in the stock library at all, which is why people end up drawing their own badly at the last minute.

A sensible scope. A brand icon set doesn't need to cover everything. Start with the concepts your business presents most often. Going through a handful of recent decks, proposals and reports will show you which icons people keep reaching for, and that list is your first release. You can add to it as new needs come up.

How icons should be built for Office

This is where plenty of beautifully designed icon sets fall over. An icon set delivered as a folder of PNGs will look sharp at one size, fuzzy at another, and be stuck in whatever colour it was exported in. The person using it can't recolour it for a dark background, so they find a different icon that can be recoloured, and the brand set gets left behind.

For Office, icons should be delivered as SVG, which PowerPoint and Word both support. Once inserted, an SVG can be recoloured from the Graphics Format tab using Graphics Fill, and if that fill is set to a theme colour, the icon follows the theme. Change the theme accent and every icon using it updates. Single-colour icons work beautifully this way.

Two-tone icons need a little more care. Using Convert to Shape turns an SVG into native PowerPoint shapes, which can then each take a different theme colour. Doing that conversion once in the template, rather than leaving it to every user, means the two-tone icons arrive already wired up to the theme and never need touching.

Native shapes are also tiny. A vector icon adds a few kilobytes to a file where a high-resolution PNG can add hundreds, and when a deck uses forty icons that difference adds up quickly.

Where should a brand icon set sit so people use it?

Distribution matters as much as design, because people will only use an icon set they can find in a hurry.

In PowerPoint, a common approach is an icon library deck, organised by category and published alongside your templates, so people can copy what they need. A better approach puts the icons inside the template itself, either as a dedicated layout people can browse or (for larger sets) behind a custom ribbon button that opens a searchable icon panel and inserts the chosen icon already sized and coloured. That last option takes some development, and it's the one that gets the most use, because it puts the brand icons in the same spot as the stock ones.

In Word, icons can be stored as building blocks in the template, organised into a gallery, so they're available from Quick Parts in every document created from that template. For documents like proposals and capability statements where icons appear in a consistent position (beside a section heading, for example), the building block can include the icon and its layout together.

For businesses using Copilot, a Brand Kit has sections for logos, images and icons. Populating it with your own icons makes it possible for Copilot to use them when it builds content, although it won't always, so the icons still need to be easy for people to reach directly in the template.

Icons and accessibility

Icons are graphics, and they carry the same accessibility responsibilities as any other image.

Most icons in business documents are decorative. They sit beside a heading that already says what the icon shows, and a screen reader announcing "lightbulb icon" before "Our ideas" adds nothing. These should be marked as decorative (right-click, View Alt Text, Mark as decorative) so assistive technology skips them. Building that flag into the icons stored in your template saves everyone from having to remember it.

Icons that carry meaning on their own, such as a tick or cross in a comparison table, need alt text that describes their meaning ("Included", "Not included"). And they shouldn't be the only thing carrying the information, since someone reading a printed greyscale copy or with low vision may not be able to tell a green tick from a red cross at a glance.

WCAG 2.1 asks for a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 for meaningful graphical objects against their background. That's worth testing when the icon colours are chosen, because a pale tint that looks elegant on screen in the design studio can disappear on a projector.

What a brand icon set costs and what it saves

The cost is a design commission and a bit of build work to get the icons into the template properly. The return shows up every time someone builds a deck or document and finds an on-brand icon in a couple of clicks, and doesn't go hunting online for something close enough.

It also shows up in the decks themselves. Consistent iconography is one of the details that makes a presentation look like it was produced by a business that has its act together, which matters most in the places you'd most want it to, like the proposal or capability statement sitting in front of an evaluation panel.

And because the icons are built as theme-aware vectors, they survive the next brand refresh. Swap the theme colours and the whole set updates with it, which is a lovely thing to watch when you've seen the alternative (a designer recolouring a whole folder of PNG files by hand).

Getting started

If your brand guidelines already define an icon style, the first step is turning that style into a working set of icons covering the concepts you use most. If they don't, the icon style is worth designing alongside the set, using your logo, typography and colour palette as the starting point.

Then build them into the templates in a way that makes them the obvious choice: SVG or native shapes, theme colours, marked as decorative where appropriate, and sitting where people already look.

Nat is a designer at Ideaseed specialising in graphic design, presentation design, document design and accessible content. She designs icon sets, diagrams and infographics for enterprise templates, and makes sure they're built to recolour, resize and stay accessible inside PowerPoint and Word.

Curious whether your templates give people the brand assets they need? Our free template health check takes a few minutes and shows you where the gaps are.