Week 13

Icon Set

Icons are an essential part of design, visually expressing objects, actions and ideas. When done correctly, they communicate the core idea and intent of a product or action, and they bring a lot of nice benefits to user interfaces, such as saving screen real estate and enhancing aesthetic appeal. Last but not least, most apps and websites have icons. It’s a design pattern that is familiar to users.

Despite these advantages, icons can cause usability problems when designers hide functionality behind icons that are hard to recognize. An icon’s first job is to guide users to where they need to go.

Things to consider:

• Easy to recognize: Try to use icons that are familiar to your users, test scalability
• Visually pleasing: Reduce the amount of graphic details, create delight by adding an animation effect
• Consistent: Icon sets should have visual unification

Design a set of icons for an interface, print design, or whatever design you’d like - have fun!