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The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Design Thinking (225-slide PowerPoint presentation). DESIGN THINKING: MASTER FACILITATOR TOOLKIT (CERTIFICATION & TRAIN-THE-TRAINER) Bridge the gap between strategic theory and frontline innovation. This exhaustive certification-level resource is a strategic discipline for solving the right problems in the right way. Designed for professional [read more]
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Marketing teams usually operate miles away from the product design pipeline. Campaign launches demand fresh presentation decks constantly. Content marketers end up digging through dusty shared folders looking for matching brand assets. Waiting for internal designers to custom-build every small visual element creates instant bottlenecks.
Can massive icon platforms actually replace in-house design systems? Especially for non-designers building assets on the fly?
After managing content production for several months using Icons8, I found a clear answer. Yes. But only when you know exactly how to manipulate their massive library.
Thursday night arrived with Vance sitting at his kitchen table. He stared blankly at a nearly finished product roadmap presentation.
His startup was launching a major mobile app interface update the following week. Dozens of graphics were missing across ten different slides to represent new features. Figma files were strictly locked down by core design teams to prevent accidental edits. Google Slides served as his only authorized tool for building external documents.
He desperately needed cohesive interface graphics matching Apple’s ecosystem perfectly. Hand-drawing them wasn’t an option. Borrowing random JPEGs from Google Images would look terrible.
Opening his browser, Vance navigated straight to Icons8. Searching directly for their iOS 17 Glyph style narrowed his options instantly. Typing basic queries surfaced thirty graphics looking completely identical to native interface elements. Lacking desktop design software didn’t matter one bit. In-browser editing saved the day.
Clicking into each graphic, Vance applied his company’s exact hex code blue. Proper padding adjustments ensured consistent sizing across the board. PNG downloads went straight to his desktop in minutes.
Within one hour, that 40-slide deck looked incredibly polished. Lead product designers would’ve assumed a senior teammate built it.
Content marketers approach visual asset generation through a few specific paths. Each carries unique frustrations that slow down production.
Banking heavily on in-house sets guarantees brand consistency. Scale ruins that plan almost immediately. Internal teams rarely have time to build out edge-case concepts for daily marketing materials. Custom main navigation graphics might look beautiful inside the core product. Finding something suitable for a highly specific blog post topic about server maintenance isn’t nearly as easy.
Open source packs like Feather or Heroicons offer excellent, clean vectors. Developers absolutely love them for building user interfaces.
Marketers often find them entirely too sterile for promotional graphics. They lack the visual punch required for vibrant social media campaigns or engaging email headers. It’s all just a bit too minimal.
Other external services like Flaticon or Noun Project provide enormous volume. Searching those platforms yields a chaotic patchwork of different author styles. Dropping three random graphics next to each other on a slide frequently looks disjointed. Line weights vary wildly. Corner radiuses jump from sharp edges to perfectly round circles depending on the contributor.
Sheer volume within standardized packs solves that consistency problem on Icons8. Picking a visual style like Windows 11 Outline pulls from thousands of graphics created by an internal team adhering to strict guidelines. Over 30,000 graphics live in their iOS 17 category alone.
Your presentation deck maintains visual uniformity from the very first slide to the last. No weird visual mismatches ruin the professional aesthetic.
Assembling infographics for platforms like LinkedIn happens constantly in digital marketing. Consistent imagery must illustrate complex technical concepts clearly for broader audiences.
Picture mapping out a new machine learning feature for a social media carousel. Search first for an ai icon to serve as your central visual anchor. Don’t download it immediately.
Drag that central graphic into a new collection folder instead. Proceed to hunt for supplementary visuals like database servers, neural networks, and security padlocks. Filtering searches specifically to the 3D Fluency style gives your social post a modern, tactile feel. Grabbing completely random styles would just recreate the Noun Project chaos.
Gathering fifteen graphics in your collection bypasses individual editing completely. Applying a preset brand palette to the entire folder takes one click with bulk recolor tools. Hit export when everything looks cohesive. Download a single zip file containing every perfectly sized PNG.
Drop those ready-made assets straight into your social media scheduling tool. Campaign prep takes half the normal time.
Tools aren’t limitless. Distinct boundaries exist when relying entirely on external libraries for visual assets. Technical or budget requirements will eventually force you into tight corners.
Free tiers are highly restrictive for print marketing or high-resolution displays. Rasterized PNG downloads max out at 100px for non-paying users. Scaling that tiny file for a large conference banner or full-screen presentation slide immediately causes heavy pixelation.
Blurry graphics ruin credibility faster than typos.
Mandatory attribution creates another hurdle for free accounts. Linking back to their site is firmly required. Client-facing corporate decks usually can’t include those competitor or vendor links without raising eyebrows. B2B marketing demands white-labeled assets.
Paid subscriptions unlock scalable vector formats like SVG or PDF. Three rare exceptions exist: Popular, Logos, and Characters categories offer free vector downloads. Everything else requires swiping a credit card.
Handing off assets to developers requires editable vector paths. Default SVG downloads arrive simplified to save file size. Unchecking that simplification setting preserves editable paths perfectly. Non-designers miss that crucial step constantly, resulting in frustrated engineering teams.
Extracting maximum value from vast libraries requires workflow adjustments. Built-in tools become powerful only when you know exactly where to click.
Millions of categorized elements change how modern content teams operate. Standardized styles and browser-based customization bypass design departments completely for daily marketing tasks.
Your output remains consistently polished. Daily workflows stay remarkably fast.
You can download in-depth presentations on User Experience and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.
For even more best practices available on Flevy, have a look at our top 100 lists:
These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.
