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Your icons will need to be explicitly designed for their purpose. Today's technological innovations have brought icons into the digital world, where they’re used in software and website user interfaces. Icons convey meaning and prompt users to take action while using less screen space than text. Plus, replacing text-heavy pages with recognizable symbols makes it much easier for the user to understand and navigate. In user interface (UI) design, icons are small visual elements—like symbols—which are used to represent certain functions, features, or types of content within a user interface. Icons are a small yet crucial part of any user interface.
Consistency across the board
However, the process and key things to keep in mind should always be the same. The second icon, however, has the plus symbol aligned to the right—which works much better with the shape it’s enclosed in (not quite a rectangle). When designing your own icons, use your designer’s eye to ensure the right alignment and balance for each individual icon. When a user encounters an icon, they should be able to easily deduce what the icon means. As such, it’s important to design your icons with your target users in mind. Universal icons are those that are easily and instantly recognisable by most users.
Icons with Background Icons
Get unlimited downloads of 2 million+ design resources, themes, templates, photos, graphics and more. Envato Elements starts at $16 per month, and is the best creative subscription we've ever seen. Once you're done with your icons, you want them to be as clean as possible for the best possible export. Use boolean operations to simplify your work (remember our friend Union?). It is absolutely worth having another person look at all your icons and double check for tidiness. Your icons should be named based on what they show, not what they represent.
Process
Styles for these icons can vary widely, from simple shapes and lines to full-color icons. On the example of the travel icon set above, you can see a base color for the design – golden yellow. Then each icon may have one or two other colors that work with that hue to pull them together. Also note, that in a few of the graphic representations, golden yellow wasn’t appropriate and the designer didn’t force it. Once you’ve refined and perfected your icon set, see how they look immediately within a design. Many modern icons have a maximum size of 1024 by 1024 pixels or greater.
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These can be hard to recognise as they’re not something the user encounters regularly. As such, they require the user to ‘learn’ them in the context of a specific app or website. For example, the GetYourGuide app uses a ticket icon to represent the user’s bookings. From use as app icons to website marks or favicons to divots that can be used in a logo or throughout a design project, the icon is a mark that’s here to stay. You don’t want users to have to think about what the icon is or what color means. Limiting the amount of detail – including elaborate coloring – can make each individual icon a little easier to see and understand.
UX Prototyping: Your Complete Guide
Icon design is just one aspect of the UI designer’s work. If you’re brand new to UI design, consider a UI design course to learn all the fundamental theory and processes first. Our guide to the best UI design courses will help you choose one. To create consistency, ensure that all icons carry the same visual weight (i.e. are the same height and width).
These rules apply to both individual icon design and to the design of entire icon families (i.e. a set of icons which all belong to the same brand or product). One of the reasons that icons have grown in popularity so much is that we are already designing them for almost everything. From app icons to app-style icons for favicons or desktop icons, this style is practically everywhere. Icon designers are taking the opposite approach with color as well and sticking to simple, more limited, more basic color palettes for these small design elements. When creating a round icon, make sure that the content of the icon design is easy to understand at small sizes, because you must shrink it often to fit in other places.
We recommend starting with Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch, as these are some of the most popular industry platforms—but you’ll find a comprehensive list of the best UI design tools here. The second icon design principle is visual clarity or readability. Icons are small, so you want to make it as easy as possible for the user to see exactly what’s going on. If you include too much fine detail or inadequate spacing, you risk your icons—and their individual elements—morphing into a blurry blob.
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Many free online tools are available to help you create your own icons, be it app icons or favicons. You can then use your custom-made icons in infographics, presentations, social media posts and more. There are many tools for creating icons, but the right one for you depends mostly on the types of icons you want to make and how you want to use them.
That might be what’s so appealing about the use of gradients in icons (and overall) – there are so many different ways to use the trend. You can add a gradient and still not have a project that looks just like something else. Part of the reason is that this icon style can work practically anywhere on any background type. Many of the popular, downloadable icon packs often include a line style design because of this versatility. The part that can be a little trick about this icon trend is meshing circles in all the places where other shapes are used.
This helps the overall composition feel balanced while creating enough white space that the two objects are easily readable. Less white space on top also helps the composition not look too square, stay within the limits of the grid, and look closer in similarity to the unlocked state. However, when we combined the two elements, we didn’t create the negative space based on the square grid. The negative space on the side is slightly greater than that on the top. I also designed an icon for our whiteboard (digital drawing canvas).
In the example above, Amtrak has a custom set of icons with a very consistent look and feel. An icon is a picture, image, or representation of another thing. So if you are looking to create a great icon, it needs to have a visual presence that’s understandable.