Icon design

Icon designs can be simple, with flat two-dimensional drawing or a black silhouette, or complex, presenting a combination of graphic design elements such as one or more linear and radial color gradients, projected shadows, contour shades, and three-dimensional perspective effects.

Special attention is given to eliminating unnecessary details and aligning strokes and objects to pixels in small icon sizes to avoid messy and blurred images.

The most common and important examples are application icons, used to represent an app on Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile platforms.

These icons rely on unique and memorable metaphors as a form of product branding.

Defining the pictogram can be different for the toolbar and other functional icons in the interface and for the icons representing independent software applications or websites which are closer to logotype or mascot design.