How to Find Clip Art Styles for PowerPoint

If you read good presentation books like Slide:ology and Presentation Zen, they’ll typically refer you to use photos for your slides rather than clip art.  Generally this isn’t a bad idea.  But there’s no reason to be dogmatic.

The reason that these books recommend not using clip art is because a lot of the clip art is dated, and many presentations mix and match the clip art used.  So you end up with amateurish slides that are neither consistent nor visually interesting. 

That doesn’t have to be the case. 

First, the Microsoft Office Online site is updated daily with all sorts of new clip art (and pictures).  They look really good and will definitely enhance your slides.  Second, much of the clip art follows a similar style.  By using the same style, you can get away from the amateurish look and create really nice presentations that look great and are consistent.

So the trick is to locate the clip art that follows the same style.  That’s what we’ll cover in this quick tutorial.  Basically, you’ll:

• search for the clip art you like
• click on the properties
• locate the style to see similar images

Clip Art Styles Tutorial

Click here to view the tutorial.

I have noticed that a lot of the newer clip art doesn’t have a style listed in the properties.  You can see an example of this at the beginning of the tutorial.  In those cases, you can fine tune the search via the keywords until you see all of the similar images together.