The Icon Design Process

Icons are more than decorative graphics for sites and applications. In this talk from beyond tellerrand 2014, Jon Hicks, the English designer who runs the studio Hicksdesign and is best known for rendering the Firefox logo into its final form, calls them little miracle workers: they summarize and explain actions, provide direction, offer feedback and can even break through language barriers.

Whether you design icons yourself or just need to work with them, the session covers the whole process of designing and deploying resolution-independent icons, from the initial brief to choosing a format and deployment method. Along the way, Hicks covers choosing the right metaphor, achieving visual balance, and using icon fonts and SVG for scalable, lightweight distribution.