Iconography is a must-have discipline for every designer. It reveals the key principles of correct icon creation and implementation in web designs. It’s all about symbolic representation and meanings attached to images, icons in this context. Embodying aesthetics (composition, proportions, line weights, positive/negative space) and functional components, iconography tells how icons should be created and how to implement them correctly in web projects. For example, one of its rules is coincidence of all icons in one design. There can be a lot of them, and each one should communicate its own idea, but at the same time it should harmoniously behave and relate to others within a design piece.
The main focus of iconography is an icon. It supports the whole design concept, communicates certain information, grabs attention and draws visitors into the site content. It’s also used for visual breaking of paragraphs, and enlivening the content. With the help of icons, users can quickly gather the desired information, find what they need on the site and seamlessly read even the long text.
The most used places for icons are titles (they add a creative touch), long content, paragraphs. The general purpose of their usage is focusing attention on something and spicing it up. It can be a list, a text, a feature, a service, a title, etc.
When it comes to their look, it should be trendy and effective. Some time ago glossy icons were extremely popular. This year when minimal design trends hit the web, clean & clear icons are in a great fave. They can be flat, colored in various hues, with or without reflections, but always refined and cool.
There are various formats of icons. They can be pixel-based (PNG, JPG, PSD), and you can’t enlarge these icons without losing quality. Most preferable are SVG icons. They are vector which means that they can be scaled. What a sense in a nice icon, if you can’t use it in the desired size? SVG icons always maintain their high quality.
You can create the desired icons yourself, or say many thanks to other designers and download their freebies. God bless all of them who create professional stuff and offer to get it for free. Here you’ll find packs of free SVG icons that contain items (with various backgrounds, colors, etc.) for whatever design projects. Grab any pack you need or download all of them to have in your collection.
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Brainy Icons
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Free eCommerce Vector Icons
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Hearty Vector Icons
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Simple Line Icons
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60 Free Flat Round Icons
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IOS7 Premium
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Icony Free Icons
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Gcons
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Don’t hesitate and choose any desired pack with SVG icons from this compilation and feel free to implement them into your great designs.
Author’s BIO: Walk with me to learn all you wanted to know about philosophy, psychology and aesthetics of modern web designs. How to find me? Katarina Klementi on Google +.
