Iconoclastic!
Icons, Icons Everywhere!
From both visual design and web development POVs, icons are an invaluable resource and a powerful tool. They can positively impact everything from navigation to chart headings. Icons can make your content or app much easier for your users to consume.
However, the inherent simplicity of icons deceptively masks the amount of time and love required to create easily recognizable icons for your users. It takes time, iterations, discussions, and even a bit of healthy discourse to ensure a set of icons compliments the brand and the experience you provide to your site's visitors.
Iconography, good iconography, strives to convey invisible reality in a visible form.
Open Source Icon Resources
Here's a few links to some amazing open source icon font projects that your designer or developer can start using today:
Developing Your Own Icon Font(s)
Creating your own icon font is an absolute advantage for your business if the open source options aren't working for you. There are paid options and icon font services that have very large amounts of icons, but as a designer and from experience, you always end up trying to make an icon mean what you want it to mean, because there's not a perfect icon in your chosen library.
Developing your own icons takes skill, care, and even a bit of clever talent. Here are some of the advantages of using icons in your art, apps and sites:
- Attention Span
- Realistically, the biggest advantage of using icons is that they have a way of helping the mind of a user to focus somewhere that interest them. That keeps their attention engaged. Nothing makes a user leave a page like lines and lines of text with nothing visual around them.
- Websites & Web Apps
- Using icons across all your digital products and sites (both public facing and internal business operations sites) brings an instant advantage for your business. Quite simply, well chosen fonts makes finding parts of a page easier to do... on all devices. Add some color or some visual way of making the icons stand out, and you've just given your users and employees an easier time to get things accomplished.
- Print Materials
- Icons used across both print and digital mediums are even more powerful. The icons really become an extension of the brand when used in print, so be sure to test and iterate before millions see it. It's hard to unlearn a decent icon image!
- Marketing
- After they've been implemented and your users are accustomed to your icons, you'll often find them very useful to target your marketing campaigns in both visual ways, and in contextual ways. The icons themself will suggest ideas just like the logo does.
- Branding
- Here's the catch, bad icons are bad for your brand. They confuse and frustrate users. So when adding icons to your products or brand, it always pays off in the long run to really be sure the icons are capturing what they represent. With hard work, and a good critical approach, any business can develop icons that work both cognitavely and visually.
In both my personal and professional projects, I've found icons and icon web fonts to be invaluable to get both a 'wow' response as well as a functionality and usability boost for users. I encourage you to use them, and help to create a better, more consumable web.
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