Have you ever stopped to think about the icons you encounter every day? These little symbols are more than just cute images. They’re an essential part of our digital lives and brand identities. They’re meant to supplement the written word, construct a helpful visual hierarchy, and they help usher the brand recognizability across a universe of brand assets.
What Are Icons and Why Do Brands Have Them?
Icons are everywhere—from the email notification on your smartphone to the vegetarian symbol on a restaurant menu, you can’t escape these helpful little mini designs. When executed well, these tiny pictures can convey massive amounts of information at a glance. You might not even realize how often you rely on them.
But why do brands use icons? They’re quick, visual shortcuts that help communicate a message without using words. In an age where attention spans are shorter than a goldfish’s memory, icons are lifesavers. There is a wide variety of psychology-based evidence to suggest brand icons contribute to brand recall and even help guide the audience’s eye around any given design.
Everyday Icons You Might Overlook
- Smartphone Icons: The envelope for email notifications, the Wi-Fi signal strength indicator, to name a few.
- Dining/Menu Icons: Symbols indicating vegetarian options, spiciness, or items on sale.
- Security Icons: Without reading a thing, icons can convey safety, reminders to exercise caution, or step-by-step helpful protocol
- Manufacturing & Processing Icons: If you’ve ever studied a map or user interface of a piece of machinery, the icons on these maps can convey what’s going on.
- Transportation Icons: From road signs to airport terminals, these little images help travelers navigate and stay informed.
- Social Media Icons: From simple “like” buttons to share icons, social media sites have their own set of easily recognizable icons that not only enhance user experience but also contribute to brand identity.
It’s fascinating to think about how many times we come across these everyday icons without giving them much thought. But for brand designers and marketers, each icon must be carefully selected to have the desired outcome and impact on a brand’s visual identity.
The Role of Icons in Visual Brand Identity
Icons are a critical component of a brand’s visual identity. Consistency is key—your icons should match the overall style of your brand. Think of them as the visual glue holding your brand together.
Examples of Icon Styles
- Multiple colors: Eye-catching and vibrant, with depth and unique branded appeal.
- Simple, flat, one color: Clean and minimalistic, not too distracting.
- Within circles, squares: Neat and contained
- 3D: More complex iconography leveraging 3D or realism can be extremely eye-catching and help elevate the perceived value of the brand.
3 Tips for Picking the Right Icon Style
- Match Your Brand’s Visual Identity: If your brand uses thin line art, opt for similar iconography. Bold drop shadows? Go for it. Make sure to match core components and get buy-in from others to ensure they feel cohesive.
- Think About Usage: Icons for a website’s mega nav menu, app buttons, or presentations should all feel like they match the asset they’re meant to supplement.
- Stay Consistent: Once you pick a style, stick to it. Consistency builds trust and recognition.
The Psychology Behind Icons
Icons aren’t just pretty pictures—they convey emotions too. Choose wisely. A low battery icon makes you anxious, while a fully charged battery brings relief. The same principle applies to brand icons. What feelings do you want your brand icons to convey and how will those icons show up in key places during your audience’s journey? How can these contribute meaningfully to sentiment, drive implied value, and other interactions and engagements?
Positive vs. Negative Icon Examples
- Positive Icons: Safe connection, approved checkmarks, heart/like
- Negative Icons: Low battery, error notifications, dislike
- Neutral Icons: Share, watch, move, transfer
- Other emotions to tap into with iconography:
- Anxious, urgency, FOMO: exclamation point, clock, countdown
- Comfortable, happy: heart, smile, high-five, handshake
- Stress-free vacation or luxury: beach umbrella, palm tree, suitcase
These examples are far from exhaustive; we’re just scraping the surface to illustrate how connected icons are to the psychology of design. We highly recommend to consider each icons’ impact to the brand messaging and visual identity overall before adding it to an approved arsenal for all to use. Once carefully selected, these icons should be re-evaluated periodically to consider if any world events or brand events impact an icon’s usage. Audits are helpful ways to ensure they’re hyper-relevant and not detracting, misleading, or misrepresenting your brand.
Refreshing Your Iconography
Feeling like your icons need a facelift? It might be time for an iconography refresh. And, while AI is great at helping us brainstorm icon ideas, generative AI tools are far from creating vector-ready, scalable and cohesive sets of icons alone without human intervention.
How to Refresh Your Icons
First, you’ll also want to sit down with key internal stakeholders to determine a primary list of icons. These should be concepts and ideas that are imperative to communicating the brand’s messaging, theme, services, products, etc. Think security, systems, resources, tools, events, verticals, industries, and more.
For example, if you’re an IT Security company, a traditional padlock lock icon could be one of your most-used icons; you may find that is the most efficient way to convey the feeling and idea of security and that it spans cultures and generations. However some of your other icon needs may be less obvious, like software bugs, malware, spam, or depicting a firewall, to name a few.
Next, jot down some key visualizations that come to mind for each of the concepts. These design notes should include what you want to see included just as much as what to avoid and exclude in the design. If you think a literal bug won’t work, but a caution sign with an ! would be better, make that clear.
Creating this list of concepts and visual inspiration helps you communicate to your designer exactly what you have in mind and what the goal or desired outcome is of each icon.
Finally, you’ll need to tap a graphic designer skilled in creating vectors for scalability and branding consistency. Pro tip: ask for your final icon set to be delivered in AI and PNG formats (so you have transparent backgrounds and a file type that can be leveraged in any asset). Did you know assets requested through the Design Pickle platform always come with source files?
Tips to Modernize Your Icons
- Avoid Gender and Ethnicity Bias: Stick to universal designs and tones unless specificity is necessary, or you want to represent unique traits within icons. Be intentional when it comes to personifying icons and consider checking in with someone who has a shared lens of the audience you’re trying to reach to test whether your intention matches your impact.
- Be Culturally Neutral: Icons should be understandable across different cultures and languages. Sometimes, something in one culture can mean quite the opposite in another, so before using things like hand signals or gestures that could be misinterpreted, try a more neutral approach, or check in with someone who shares the audience’s perspective.
- Find a fresh approach: If your last set of icons leveraged thick lines and drop shadows, and your brand is more white and clean these days, try thin line icons. On the contrary, if your brand used to be plain and mostly white with thin icons, and now you’ve gone full-on dark mode with high contrast, try eye-catching colors on your icons so they jump off the black/dark backgrounds.
- Clarity is Key: One of the most important considerations – ensure your icons are easily recognizable at a glance. When in doubt, ask your colleagues to take a peek at any new icons you’re considering. Have a customer advisory board? Ask them, too!
Ready for a Fresh Set of Icons?
Icons might be small, but they pack a punch when it comes to brand identity. If you’re ready to refresh your iconography or start from scratch, get started with Design Pickle. Send us your creative brief, detailing the list of icons you’ve got in mind and we’ll have a draft spun up overnight. And if you’re having a hard time ideating new icon ideas, take our built-in AI for a spin and prompt away to see what it can come up with as a jumping off point for your design team!
Icons are more than just tiny images; they’re a crucial part of communicating your brand’s message. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll be well on your way to iconographic greatness.
Ready to make a change? Design Pickle is here to help!
