5 Tips to Make Your First Icon Set Creation Easier
I’ve started designing icons not so long ago. If you’ve never done it before icon design process can be very challenging. A lot of research, hard work and knowledge is required. I’ve found some helpful tips during the process of creating my first icon set that might help you in your icon design journey.
Moodboards
A mood board is a type of collage consisting of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition. Moodboards are good to keep track on trends and defining best practices. When you lay out popular works and look at them all together common features and techniques become more obvious and easy to spot. You can also adapt interesting features and ideas to fit your project. Photos of real life objects used in moodboards are setting the mood, direction and color scheme of your design.
Drawing Skills
A common idea is “you need to know how to draw by hand to create icons”. Well, no, you don’t, really. As long as you see and understand forms objects composed with, and you can repeat them on paper and computer or just copy objects from photos you are ready to start with icon creation. Also, saving all (or the majority) of the stages/variations of your icon is a good idea. This way you can return to previous step without redrawing the same details over and over again.
Composition and Gestalt Rules
Composition rules should be applied to the icon set to maintain cohesive look. Rules will help with positioning of decorative elements and accents, placement of certain parts and balancing of the icon. Gestalt principles can be applied to every design in every field. Principles refer to a theory that the whole is greater than the sum of parts. They explain how humans tend to organize elements they see into groups and perceive them as a unified meaningful whole instead of unorganized mess. So, if you want people to correctly and clearly understand what you wanted to depict gestalt principles are very important.
Small Scale
Your icons should look good in any size screen. To avoid problems like “it looks like a blurry mess in 0.5x size” test your icons in the smallest scale you’ll have. Or, what is better, start with a small scale icon. You’ll be able to define bare minimum of details needed and make it as recognizable as possible. It can be hard or limiting but you’ll be sure your icons won’t look as a colorful spot. You can also add more details to bigger scale versions if they seem really plain.
Text
The last tip is to avoid using text in icon design. Text is bad not only because it scales poorly, but also it is not universally recognizable. Yeah, most of the world understands English, but not every person. Words can have different meanings and translations depending on a country. For clear perception of an icon try to avoid using text (and if you really-really need it — recreate it with lines and forms).
Icons are very important part of any design. If done right, they can improve visual perception of your product, make it easier to navigate and enjoyable to use. I hope these tips will make design of decent icon set a bit easier for you. Here are some links to help you start with icon creation:
Design Principles by Steven Bradley
Design Talk from Skype Icons Designer
Free Icon Design Guide by Icon Utopia
Thank you for reading!
