Microsoft Illustration Styles for a Consistent look and feel in your document/ presentation

I usually advocate the use of stock photos, amateur photography in documents and presentations. That said, I cant deny the need for high quality illustrations to add pop to your imagery and visualization. I like Microsoft Online for the fact that they provide meta-files that you can group, ungroup and regroup to create custom images. This said, we don't want our images to look like they were created by completely different artists. So I've learnt to look for specific styles to keep the look and feel of my document consistent. The way to seek out thousands of editable graphics is to go to Microsoft Office Online and search for images as I've done below:



Here are some of the styles I recommend for your documents/ presentations/ e-learning modules. Some I admit are more retro than the others and may not appeal to your taste, but oh well!

Style Example 1 15 68 148 487 588 707 792 802 925 1268 1280 1278 1295 1358 1366 1370 1382

Style Example 1402 1441 1445 1449 1450 1461 1511 1534 1540 1541 1549 1568 1576 1580 1592 1593 1597

All in all, I find Microsoft illustrations quite flexible when it comes to their use in documents and presentations, particularly because I'm not limited by the original composition and context of the images and that I can actually choose to combine element from different images to create the custom scenes that I want. Again, its important that these images are used in a consistent fashion so that your audience gets a uniform look and feel that doesn't ever look like a forced collage!

Read more about this in Tom Kulhmann's post here.