The icons are, without a doubt, one of the most used graphic elements today in the interface design of digital products. And to make this statement with some degree of certainty, we do not even need a very robust statistical analysis. Just remember the interface of that application where we just ordered a transport, last night when we saw a movie through an online platform or even the most recent visit we made to our homebanking. The truth is that icons are everywhere in our daily lives, on or offline.

It is also true that in terms of their design, the languages ​​are the most varied and creative that we can imagine. There are icons for all tastes, shapes and forms. Whether you have a strictly functional mission to indicate a direction, or serve as a graphic reference in the hierarchy of information on a given page, icons are one of the visual tools most used by designers, in the most varied areas of activity.

Definition of icons

Although the drawing style of the icons can vary greatly (as we will see later), their definition is quite easy. Defining what icons are, at least in terms of their use in the interface of a digital product, is relatively simple. We can define an icon, as being an image constructed through its own visual language, with some degree of similarity but also of abstraction, in face of a figure recognized by a certain group of people.

In this definition, a number of characteristics are evident, among which some are closely related to the dimension of the graphic design itself. When designing an icon or a complete iconographic family, for a wider use in the product, one of the most important points is the definition of the drawing style, or better saying, its visual language.

#design #user-interface #icons #visual-design #graphic-design #data visualization