Icon design.

Icons are incredibly powerful. They can convey information quickly and effectively.

Most apps are their icons – think Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter – the icon has effectively become the main focus of the branding and is instantly recognisable.

When done properly your icon set can become an extremely valuable part of your marketing toolkit. We can help you to design a full set of icons for your business, product or service.

Icons need to work across a wide range of channels at a lot of different sizes, so there are some important design considerations that need to be taken into account.

When we work with you on your icon designs, we start by brainstorming all the different types of icon designs you may need, and where they will be used.

This then leads us into design research – looking at other icons to develop mood boards for inspiration and potential creative direction.

We then move on to initial sketches, working quickly on paper to cover lots of ideas and possibilities.

These sketches then form the basis of the design development where we take the preferred concepts and begin working them up as vector graphics.

Icon styles.

Depending on your branding and corporate style guide, you may need a particular style of icon design. This could be linework, symbolic, graphic or illustrated, but we’re able to provide creativity for these different styles in-house.

As we progress through the design process, we’ll look at how the icons behave at different sizes and on different devices.

Icons may be used on lots of different applications, so they’ll need to work equally well on the side of a van as they do at 50 pixels square on a mobile phone.

When we design your full set of icons, we pay very careful attention to consistency across the entire set. This means that they’ll work well on their own and when displayed together.

Typically we’ll work icons up in Adobe Illustrator as vector files so they can be scaled effectively and exported in lightweight formats such as SVG files.

Once the icons are finalised, we can supply them in all the formats you’ll need – from JPG and PNG files to PDFs and SVGs.

When using icons, it’s important that they all scale correctly, so we supply everything as outlined artwork. However, we also keep all the original artwork so we can add to or edit your icon designs further down the line.

There are 1000s of icon sets for sale on stock sites, so why bother having a set of icons designed?

If you are going to use a set of icons as part of your corporate identity, do you really want 1000s of other businesses using the same set of icons?

Stock icons have their uses, but we tend to work with clients that want their own site of unique icons to form part of their brand.

A custom-designed set of icons won’t be seen anywhere else, so they strengthen rather than dilute your branding.

We are also so used to seeing stock icons now that they’ve almost become invisible – this is where custom icons stand out.

If you have a larger set of icons, we can turn them into a font so they can be used across different apps.

Icons need to be SVGs or PNGs for your website, but what about if you need to use them in PowerPoint or Word?

You can always import them as an image, but many of our clients find it easy if we create a custom font from the icon set than then be used consistently by everyone in your organisation.