Icons, Icons, Icons!

Happy Day-After-Canada-Day everybody!

In today’s world design and aesthetic appeal change at a ridiculous rate, just keep tabs on fashion, any kind of imaging, the music industry, and main-stream advertising and you will see all kinds of different styles, colors, mixtures of style and color, flair, presentation and more changing all the time.

The same is true for web design. We all know by now that you can design a site that looks ancient (circa. 1998) and thankfully that “style”-or should I call it practicality- did not last for that, that long and we have moved on. We have moved into all kinds of visually moving, exciting, compelling designs. Many designs that use videos, animation, and high resolution imaging that was once only dreamed of.

As web designers we have a myriad of styles we work with and view all the time, just to list a few:

Web 2.0 (Shiny…EVERYTHING)

Grunge

Clean

Flash Sites that mix all kinds of stuff

Illustrative etc…

Moving beyond the over-arching style and feel of any given web site we see that to give that larger feeling of “Wow, this is a pretty sweet site!” a designer usually focuses on the finer points and in the case of this blog post I want to talk about icons, yes icons those tiny packages of -sometimes- incredible artwork. Icons are everywhere, literally everywhere on the web and in day to day activities.

The icon may have started as the humble bullet point and one day somebody had a flash of brilliance and decide the black circle/square wouldn’t cut it anymore, who knows… do you? Anyway the icon sure has come a long way since then serving all kinds of purposes in the web world these days.

From –yes- bullet points, to styling in toolbars, navigation links, counters and countless other things the icon is everywhere. Just look around you on the web, go to all your favorite sites both sites you use for functionality and sites you just like because they look good and you will notice the use of icons in virtually all of them.

I really believe the use of icons is one of the things that is often overlooked by young designers and it can really raise your game as far as designing is concerned. Who knew it, but those tiny packaged of art may well be your ticket to taking the next step in your work as a designer.

Lastly, let me know your thoughts on icons. Love em’? Hate em’? Never used em’? Or do you make em’? Give me your thoughts.

Well last up what would a post about icons be without actually including a couple sites that have them for free?!

http://www.vistaicons.com/

http://www.iconarchive.com/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/06/35-really-incredible-free-icon-sets/

http://dryicons.com/free-icons/

http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/40-big-high-quality-apple-product-icons

http://icondrawer.com/free.php