What Is Iconography?

What Is Iconography?

Icons are more than just decoration; they’re a powerful language that transcends written words. By using clear and consistent icons, you can guide users intuitively through your website or app, enhancing navigation and overall user experience (UX). This is especially important in today’s world where users expect a smooth and efficient interaction....

How to Design Icons?

You can follow this 4 step process to design icons, here I am using a very popular prototyping tool called Figma....

Best Practices

Your icon must be your original: Originality is an more important aspect as we think it to be when it comes to designing icons. The dilemma in iconography is that while on one hand icons should appear common across all websites to make them understandable and representative of the action that will be performed upon clicking it, one also has to avoid coping the generic icons everybody else is using in their design. Keep it Minimalistic: Contrary to popular belief, minimalistic graphics are more appealing to the users specially in the case of Icons. Minimalist icons perform better than complex ones in capturing the user’s attention since they do not put much cognitive load on the users. Not only they are much well taken by the customers, this also retains the icon in the mind of the customers making it easier to understand and more impactful. Icons must be versatile: While designing icons, you may not always know which background it will be added on, and at some cases, the backgrounds are also changed and that is why your Icon design must be versatile, by this we mean that it should be able to work with different backgrounds. In order to come up with an versatile icon, you can follow a simple process of designing icon or set of Icons and testing them visually with different backgrounds. Visual Balance – follow color theory: 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. Take feedback and iterate: Once the final icon is ready, your job is not done yet. 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....

Conclusion

Iconography is the use of visual elements what we call as Icons in order to represent any idea, subject or action that is to be performed. These Icons are visual symbols or simple figure that look depict what action will be taken if we click them. The key things you should remember while designing icons is originality of icons, usage of colors, tint, contrast, etc. to set up a proper visual balance and make sure to keep the icon minimal. Make sure to follow the points we mentioned in our article in order to design professional icons for your next project....