Icons: How does a developer with no design skill make his/her application icons look pretty?

Question

I probably spend far too much time trying to make my visual interfaces look good, and while I'm pretty adept at finding the right match between usability and style one area I am hopeless at is making nice looking icons.

How do you people overcome this (I'm sure common) problem? I'm thinking of things like images on buttons and perhaps most important of all, the actual application icon.

Do you rely on third party designers, in or out of house? Or do you know of some hidden website that offers lots of icons for us to use? I've tried Google but I seem to find either expensive packages that are very specific, millions of Star Trek icons or icons that look abysmal at 16x16 which is my preferred size on in-application buttons.

Any help/advice appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi,

We have an in-house designer that does ours, although we also use freelance designers, too.

You could try starting a design competition on 99 Designs?

There are also some free icon sets available, like these.

If you google around, you'll also find quite a few commercially available icon sets that you can use (although obviously neither of the icon set options will get you an icon specific to your app!).

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

If you have money, definitely go with a professional designer. At first if you don't have too many projects requiring a designer, just hire one on a contract basis. If you start feeling the need for a full-time designer then it's going to be beneficial to hire one.

Good looking free icon sets are available, but you should shop around for a decent icon set which you can reuse for most of your projects.

Finally, if you don't have access to a designer, just keep the look very clean and simple, because chances are that you can't do a good looking design (since you're not an artist).

Answer 3

Good icons are hard to design. I have tried to design my own, and have used in-house graphics designers as well. However, building a good icon set takes a lot of work, even for the graphic designer.

I believe your best solution is to buy/find a set of icons for use in your projects.

The silk icon set is a good, free set and can be found at FamFamFam. There are over 1000 icons in this set, and it is very popular.

If you are looking for something "different", you can purchase icon sets for a couple hundred bucks. Considering the cost of having a designer create them for you, or doing them yourself, the cost of these sets is cheap!

Here's a few icon designers I've come across of the web:

• Icon Factory
• Icon Experience
• Icon Buffet

Answer 4

I came across IconBuffet when registering my copy of Visual Studio Express. They have some awesome icons that you could use in your applications.

For application development I have also started playing with WPF interfaces in .Net, soon to be available on Mono as well. With the ability to use web images and pictures in Windows Applications even not creatives can develop some awesome interfaces.

For website layouts I use sites like OSWD for designs and layouts that are free.

Answer 5

I recommend IconFactory, too. Or to be exact: http://stockicons.com/ There are a lot of icon sets for an affordable price and I think buying a professional set is the best choice you have if you're not a graphics designer yourself.

If you only need a single icon, it's probably worth to hire a graphics designer.

Answer 6

Don't forget either that unless you have lots of toolbar buttons or other such objects to fill, its possible to get by with very few icons beyond your own unique application icon and system icons. (Remember to call them from existing libraries on the user's machine, not repackage them, keep the lawyers happy.)

Having too many icons can be just as bad as having some ugly ones. Many guidelines state that if you can't have professional looking icons have some whitespace instead. It can help to keep the interface light and feel uncluttered.

Answer 7

You can always go on Elance and hire someone to make any icons/logos for you. I've done it several times and it's pretty cheap for what you're getting. There is so much competition on that site that someone will eventually come in at your price point. I've always believed theres no point in spinning your wheels with something you don't really specialize in.

Oh yeah and like this site, keeping it simple is always best!

Answer 8

But why on earth do you think you need to make icons to make your interfaces look good? Icon driven interfaces are the bane of UI these days. Look at a screenshot of Komodo IDE or Eclipse for example. These are horrendously badly designed interfaces. It's impossible to tell what the buttons do until you hover over them and get the tooltip. I suggest you use text unless there is an icon that better represents the concept, not feel you need to represent every idea visually.

I guess it depends what context you're developing UI for - have you a lot of users who don't speak English as their first language? Is it for occasional use or for power users to use every day? Is it a web site? Is it a desktop application?

But when you really need icons, there are some good libraries out there. I think consistency is really important; Tango for instance "exists to help create a consistent graphical user interface experience for free and Open Source software." and the rather attractive icons are licensed under Creative Commons

Answer 9

I try to keep my applications very simple. Simplicity and usability can be a good design in-and-of itself if done intelligently.

Take all of the buttons for Stackoverflow for example. It shouldn't be very difficult to implement something similar in your own application. They are simple and they get the job done.

Answer 10

I like the free silk icons at famfamfam, but they're png's, and when I convert them to ico format, they look pretty crappy. Not sure what I'm doing wrong...

Answer 11

I thought it may be interesting to mention that Axialis has just released a version of the their Icon Studio for Visual Studio 2008 for free. It will only install if VS 2008 Pro or TFS is installed and plugs directly into the VS toolbar.

Answer 12

I have a couple that I really like:

GlyFx and Liquidicity Vector Icons.

Those from Liquidicity are specially useful for WPF or Silverlight, you can make an interface that even zoomed looks great.

Answer 13

I like the free silk icons at famfamfam, but they're png's, and when I convert them to ico format, they look pretty crappy. Not sure what I'm doing wrong...

Sounds like you're removing the alpha channel. You need to make sure you're loading them as 32-bit ARGB PNGs before converting them to icons.

Answer 14

I have always liked the icon selections at VirtualLNK. They have a good number of icon packages that have a modern look at a reasonable price.

Answer 15

Try this site www.iconsreview.com, they offer reviews for a variety of icon packages, both free and for purchase.

Answer 16

www.iconshock.com has over 400,000 icons and you can buy the entire collection for around $400.

Alternatively there are a number of sites offering free icons, just be sure to check the licence.

Answer 17

You don't have to be a great designer to come out with a decent UI and a great user experience for your application.

I think there are certain principles you can follow that can dramatically improve your application.

At a high level this includes:

• Identifying your top 3 use cases
• Measuring and reducing the number of clicks it takes to get through the top use cases
• Sketch, Prototype, Throw it away, and challenge yourself to do it with less

I've written a blog entry that attempts to write out some principles related to GUI design. Check it out and let me know what you think.

How to improve the User Experience of your GUI application with some simple principles.

Answer 18

These are the icon links I found some time ago, I think they were not posted yet:

• http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=22x27

• http://www.blogmundi.com/2007/12/10/3700-iconos-gratis-para-tu-web-o-blog/

• http://sweetie.sublink.ca/

• http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library

this also sounds interesting: http://openclipart.org/media/tags/icon but their web does not seem to offer quick previews (thumbnails)

Answer 19

Try aiming for clean and simple first, and then worry about aesthetic elements.

Answer 20

How does a designer with no programming skills write software?

They get a programmer to do it.

Answer 21

You might want to check this post. I listed some of the best icon search engines and icon catalogs.

Answer 22

Cheat and use photo's!

I've struggle with this, What I tend to do now, is find photos of objects BUT on a plain white background. The background can be made transparent. I then use this Conversion tool to convert a PNG file into an .ico. When exporting include all resolutions up to 512 pixel size for good results.