7 Principles of Icon Design

Creating a high-quality icon family requires a thoughtful approach, a trained eye, a bit of iteration, and a lot of practice. Below, I’ll illustrate the hallmarks of quality through 7 principles and plenty of real-world examples. The goal is to tune you to the key attributes of great icon design.

The Morning Paper Revisited

There’s something special about the layout of a print-edition newspaper. A news website has infinite vertical scrolling space, but a printed front page is fixed to the same size every day. This constraint creates a very particular aesthetic and — if done well — a sense of typographic balance.