Best Practices for Designing Icons

1. Minimalistic design

Contrary to popular belief, minimalistic graphics specially Icons logos perform better in capturing the user’s attention and are much well taken by the customers. This retains the logo in the mind of the customers. Simple and minimalist design puts less cognitive load on the visitor’s brain making it easier to understand and more impactful.

2. Originality

Originality is an important aspect when it comes to designing icons while on the other hand icons must be understandable and representative of the action that will be performed upon clicking it. Avoid coping the generic icons everybody else is using in their design and come up with an original design also keeping in mind that the icon is easy to read for the user and visual represents the action it performs.

3. Versatile

Your Icon design must be versatile, by this we mean that it should be able to work with different backgrounds. This helps when you may be changing themes of your application or your website. For creating a versatile icon, you can simply design your icon or set of Icons and test them with in different backgrounds and iterate of the basis of the results.

4. Visual Balance

The icons we design must be is visual balance. By this we mean that the icons we design should follow a visual language and follows the color theory. For this make sure that the colors and the contrast being used in the stroke or the background (if any) should match and complement one another.

5. User feedback and iterating

The first iteration of your Icon may not be perfect but taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about the icon design and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the Icon we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.

Icons are visual elements in a design that are used to represent some content or action in a website or an application. The job of an icon is to represent the functionality behind the action that occurs when someone clicks or taps that icon. Since in UI/UX design, the first impression is the last impression, Icons are a great way to create that first impression for any action that has to be performed within the website or application.

In this article, we will discuss what Icons are and what is the step-by-step process for designing icons. We will also discuss the best practices for designing icons.

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