It’s no surprise that a writing blog would say “avoid clichés.” But we need to remember that clichés

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are not limited to phrases or expressions that are overused. An image can become a cliché, as they’ve been discussing on the slide:ology blog.

If we do anything at Duarte Design, we work hard to free our clients from “uninterestingness”, that debilitating affliction to which business presentations seem particularly vulnerable. And one of the symptoms for uninterestingness comes from the cloud of automatic visual metaphor, that smelly old town dump of our collective visual consciousness.
 
We call it the cliché.

Clichés are those tired, overused, well-worn ideas that seem to dominate every boring presentation you’ve ever attended. And we’ve seen plenty of them. To be perfectly honest, we’ve used quite a few of them ourselves.

So far, they’ve identified these visual clichés:

• The handshake
• The water ripple

I’ve been guilty of resorting to some of these tired images in my presentations, such as a light-bulb for “bright ideas.”

What are your (least) favorite visual clichés?