Every tech business owner wants to win the market heart, and it is through the Click-Through-Rate metric they can count how many audiences are aware of their tech product, e.g.: app or software.  

That is when you find out that software icon design matters. So how can one create remarkable app icons? 

Before wandering to fundamental keys to creating a distinctive app icon, learn first about why you should do it right. 

Why Do App Software Icons Matter?

App icons do not equal a logo. Yet, the brand or company logo and software icon share the same objective. 

They are part of brand identity; they should be recognizable and ensure that they capture the audience from their very first glimpse to generate a click and a download. 

So the first reason why an app icon matters are acknowledgment. It can be a consideration for potential users to be conscious of your product. 

You also want to send your audience or targeted users the right impression or perception about your product, one that shares the same frequency.

It leads us to the second reason, the classification of products you offer to your future users. When scrolling the app stores, you’ll notice that the software icons share akin styles. 

For example, apps for the transportation industry tend to have a green color background, while travel-related software uses blue as its code. 

Being presentable is the third aspect since the app icon will appear in different dimensions according to your users’ devices. 

Now, follow the 5 primary keys to make a software icon that corresponds to those aspects!

5 Keys For App Software Icon Designs

Collect The Marketing Information

Take a little step by collecting your brand marketing objective. Learn about the audience persona, what kind of message and visual resonate with them, your product value proposition, and also your branding guideline.

This step will help you to sort out what is important to represent your brand identity. You can explore your creativity along the journey to interpret those fundamentals. 

Conceive The Platform Guidelines

There is undoubtedly a submission requirement to place your app icon in the app store for iOS and Android, which requires proper knowledge of the guidelines. 

Meanwhile, you want to create harmonious icons that apply to App Store and Google Play store. Having a comprehensive understanding of the technical and aesthetical aspects will make your creation journey easier. 

Mind The Branding Aspect

This is an essential rule according to the first reason why software icon design matters. 

Put the key visual such as color and style approach (e.g for shapes or symbols) which align with your branding guideline. You can use the psychology of colors to decide which will best convey your branding message. 

Pick ones that will represent your branding aspects well to gain or maintain brand awareness by being recognizable across different communication materials. 

Find A Strong Visual Design Matches To Your App’s Purpose

Being authentic is necessary, but a strong visual design also needs to be flexible. 

Think about a strong visual element that can convey emotions aligned with the solution to your audience’s problems. 

Help yourself to do the ideation process by approaching a competitor landscape analyst. You can get an idea by examining the weaknesses and strengths of your competitor app icons. 

There are some tools you can use to do the competitor analysis. Based on the data, imagine what improvement you can do to generate your proper app icon.  

You can combine a visual element that strongly associates with the product or the solution you offer with the brand colors to create a distinctive yet familiar icon. Just like what Google did for Gmail. 

Do The Evaluation Test

Evaluation test or so-called A/B testing, seems like an exhaustive thing to do. However, it is better to do it before the actual launch. 

Thus, make several options of icon designs for different scenarios. Start with the icon dimension to check its legibility. Use various resolutions to discover which works the best and meets the platform guidelines. 

Gather a panorama of users’ reactions to your app icon using third-party tools. 

Mind the strategies explained will be serviceable for designing software icons in accordance with the objective. Explore various kinds of icons on our Creative Market page to enrich your icon vocabulary!