Which mobile APP icon looks the best and is your favorite?

The application icon is the user's first impression of your application, and the user can judge whether the application is beautiful and friendly through the application icon. A good product should have a good application icon to a great extent, and a good application icon should clearly convey the connotation of the product and make the user experience peaceful and unified from the outside to the inside. Therefore, designers should pay attention to the following eight principles when designing application icons.

1. recognizable

The first premise of an excellent icon design is that it is accurate in expression, which enables users to recognize the meaning it represents at a glance and is close to the metaphor in users' minds. Therefore, identifiability is the first principle of trademark design. Since the flat design style became a popular trend, the quasi-materialized icons gradually disappeared and were replaced by plane graphics with weak texture. In fact, this puts forward higher requirements for design. It could have been expressed in very specific graphics, but now it can only convey the correct information through abstract graphics. In iOS, the icon of system music application is a very good design example, but the metaphor of game center is very poor, so it is difficult for users to read its meaning from several color bubbles and get relevant information from it. In the figure below, the first three application users can easily identify their product attributes. Although the final application icon has distinct personality characteristics, it is difficult to convey it to users visually. Cameras, photographs, photos and other information.

2. Difference

There are millions of applications in the AppStore. Searching for common product names can get dozens of results, and many of their application icons are similar. In order to make your application stand out among many similar products, designers must show differences while highlighting the core functions of the products and avoid visual homogenization.

3. Continue the product interface

It is the most perfect design method to extract design elements from the product interface as a reference for application icons, so that users can see at a glance what kind of product this is, what is the main color, what is the design language, what is the interface, etc. Clear is the best example among similar products. Its application icon design is not only metaphorical, but also continues the design style of product interface. The simple shape is superimposed with the effect of bright and bright color blocks, which makes Clear unique.

Watch out for the white background

In order to pursue the ultimate aesthetic feeling, more and more designers design application icons with white background. Undeniably, from a single visual point of view, using icons with white background highlights the main body and is also very concise. However, considering the application to different desktop wallpapers, icons with white background are easily submerged in other brightly colored icons. Especially when the mobile phone wallpaper is white, the icons on the white background present a vivid picture like the irregular icons of Android. At the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned that when irregular application icons are arranged together, the picture will become very irregular.

5. Highlight the brand

When designing the application icons of well-known brand products, we should make full use of their brand Logo, which have left a deep impression on users and are very easy to identify. For example, QQ has been using a cute little penguin as its brand image for ten years, which has been deeply imprinted in the hearts of users. Whenever I hear or see penguins, I always think of QQ at the first time. Even if all the decorations of the penguin image are removed and only simple silhouette graphics are kept, users will not misunderstand. This is the charm of the brand, and we should make good use of it when applying icon design to continue the vitality of the brand.

6. Bright colors

IOS 10 man-machine interface guide provides a set of design specifications, which clearly defines the color matching. Built-in applications choose those colors that look more personalized, pure and clean, telephone messages use green, weather and browsers use blue, and memos and tips use yellow. Using bright colors when designing application icons will make your application more attractive to users.

7. Use grid lines

When designing application icons, designers should always take the IOS grid line as the design basis, which can keep your design peaceful and unified with the IOS system. The more icons designed by grid lines, the more they can match each other in the interface, and the stronger the overall sense of icons in the interface.

8. Multi-scenario testing

The application icon we finally designed will appear in the mobile phone's home screen, AppStore and interface at different resolutions. Designers need to design and test in various icon application scenarios, and adapt as perfectly as possible. In the AppStore. The icon size is 1024× 1024px, which means that designers can have a lot of room to play and can depict many details. On the main screen of the mobile phone, the icon size is 120× 120px. Large-scale enlargement into a small picture will lose some details and blur the picture. At this time, the designer needs to fine-tune the small-sized icons and remove unnecessary decorative elements to ensure that the application icons can maintain clear recognition in small-resolution scenes. After doing this, you must also test your design on mobile devices. If you design a drawing in Photoshop, you can connect PsFlay to display it on your mobile phone for confirmation.

The above content is provided by Silk Road Education.