PyrusMalus | Design

Icon Design

Effective icon design

PyrusMalus can design and deliver high-quality icons for your application or website. These pages will provide an overview of our philosophy of icon design, demonstrate the process we follow when designing icons, and show case some of our designs.

Icons have been an important part in human existence, from early cave paintings to the latest road signs, from hieroglyphics to toolbars.

If you're reading this page on the web you've already clicked on numerous icons to get here: from the icon for your web browser to the marbles at the bottom of this web page.

Icons, in the correct context, must convey their meaning quickly and effectively if the interface is to be easily understood. Unfortunately, many icons are poorly designed, which leads to confusion. Designing an effective icon requires the designer to understand how people perceive and recognise icons.

We can design your application's icon and toolbar icons, as well as design icons for websites and interactive presentations. We have provided icons for use on Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Windows. This section showcases the philosophy behind the design of specific icon types, and the solutions we offer.

Application icon design

The application icon is often the first thing that someone sees when they interact with your application, and should convey the purpose of the application in an inviting and appealing manner. Corporate branding may also play an important part in the design of an application icon, enabling icons to have a recognizable house-style. Document icons can then be created based on the application icon design.

We design application icons to be an ambassador for your product: to convey its purpose whether on the desktop or within the dock; and to ensure your application gets the recognition it deserves.

Toolbar icon design

Toolbar icon can be a challenging task: conveying a particular action while conserving screen real-estate; fitting in harmoniously, yet being easily distinguishable from each other. There are other challenges too: fitting in with the platform's human interface guidelines, yet at the same time creating a recognizable house-style.

Other toolbar icons:

We design toolbar icons in conjunction with a continual process of usability testing and refinement, to ensure that the completed toolbar contains icons which work well together.

Website icon design

Website icons typically do not have the restriction of having to comply with a particular platform's human interface guidelines, but that doesn't mean that the principles of good human interface design should be ignored. The purpose of icons on a website should be immediately obvious — a guest to the website doesn't have the time to learn what the icons represent. In many cases adding text to the icon will reinforce the meaning, and ensure that the guest isn't forced to decipher the icons.

We often work with creative professionals to ensure that their visual design of a website doesn't adversely affect the usability or accessibility of the website. It can be a difficult task to ensure that an icon is visually inviting, and also easily recognizable, and this collaborative approach — coupled with continual testing and refinement — helps produce icons that work well.

Interface design

Icon design is part of the much larger interface design process: ensuring that the overall application is designed and structured in such a way that it works the way its users expect it to. A well-designed application should make simple things simple to do; and complex things possible. Often it is the small details that can make the difference between an application that users use, and one they love.

We offer interface design for software applications, as well as advice and consultancy on improving existing applications.

Copyright

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