Book: Special - The Icon Handbook

The Icon Handbook

By Jon Hicks

The go-to book for the modern designer, starting at the basics and taking you right the way through to being able to create stunning iconography.

About this book

Have you ever needed to create an icon for something and not known where to start? How do you go about crafting the right message, the tone, the line work and getting it to work in the environment it's supposed to; be it mobile, operating system, or browser? Thankfully we now have the place to go.

Jon Hicks' 'The Icon Handbook' will become the go-to book for the modern designer; for uncovering the thought processes, the skills and the reference for designing your own icons.

Topics include

Let’s start the journey from the very beginning and look at the development of a symbolic language to complement our written one, how previous works have influenced modern icon design, and how the meaning of icons has evolved from religious art to encompass software. As part of the journey, I’ll also delve into how I became involved with designing icons as early as 1984.

Icons are more than just decoration or pretty pictures. They serve a wide range of purposes, from overcoming language barriers and describing functions, to conveying mood and emotion. This chapter looks at the various uses of icons, but also covers an equally important aspect — when not to use them.

Now we’ll start building up our icon skills, beginning with favicons. Even if you’ve never created any other types of icons before, I’m willing to bet that everyone reading this has at some point made a favicon. For the majority of you, it’s probably a regular task. They’re an ideal place to start, as we can look at ways of achieving pixel-crisp artwork and clarity at small sizes — skills that we’ll build on in later chapters.

The heart of an icon is the metaphor it uses, the functionality implied by the visual representation. This chapter starts as all projects do, with a client brief. We’ll pick up this brief and run with it, working through the process of discovering if icon conventions already exist, and how to create them if they don’t.

At this point in the book, we’ve been through the initial process of reading the brief, checking for existing conventions, and deciding on the right metaphor to use. We’ve also created some simple favicons — now let’s move on to creating some proper icons! In this chapter we’ll look at the drawing process, then in chapter 6 we’ll consider the final file format and deployment method for the icon which can have a bearing on how we create the artwork. We’ll start with simple pictograms and then move on to small colour icons. We’ve already covered some basics of drawing to crisp pixels in chapter 3 about favicons. This chapter will build further on that, introducing the concepts of balance and consistency.

About Jon Hicks

Jon Hicks

Hicksdesign is the creative partnership of Jon & Leigh Hicks.

Hicks Design have built a reputation for great work with great clients such as Mailchimp, Skype and Spotify from their small, but very busy studio in Oxfordshire, UK where he can often be found gliding the tarmac on one of his many bikes.

Jon has created a fantastic web-specific resource that every web designer should own

Simon Collison