Picto-Selector

“Picto” refers to pictograms, which are visual symbols that represent things, such as “table,” “chair,” and “men’s room.” Pictograms convey meaning quickly and intuitively, and they’re used in many areas, including design, transportation, and education. Picto Selector is a free tool that makes it easy to choose and create pictograms for any purpose. You can choose from thousands of free “pictos” and combine them by theme, style, or usage into picto sheets, or create new pictos from your own images and text. It offers print overlays for speech technologies, too. You can use it to create customized flash cards for teaching your kids how to read or design a pedestrian-friendly concourse for a new international airport with its symbols.

When you first run Picto Selector, the installation wizard asks you if you want to store the program’s database on your PC or a database server; we chose the default option, local storage on our PC, which involves choosing a location and setting access policies, including entering our initials as a log-on ID and for the program to use in sorting sheets. When we’d finished the setup process, Picto-Selector opened its main user interface with an optional tool tip. The program’s optional update checker found an updated version right away, too.

While that sounds involved, the whole process took mere minutes, and we could log on with our existing ID. Picto Selector downloaded more than 30,000 pictos (they’re very small) to update our library. We finished with an up-to-date tool and a topped-off picto database.

After all that installing and updating, we were ready for a complicated tool, but we were pleasantly disappointed; with drag-and-drop capability and a pop-up Picto List to choose from, Picto Selector is not only extremely easy to use but fun, too. We clicked New Sheet to call up the program’s template tool, quickly creating picture, text, and clock pictos; sclera pictos (white on black); and even way-cool timer pictos with analog or digital countdown displays using the Time Timer feature. Picto Selector has an Advanced User option that adds still more capabilities. If you’re looking for pictos, try Picto Selector.