One of the key perks of using an icon font is its scalability. They can be resized without losing quality, making them perfect for responsive web design, as they can be scaled – with CSS media queries – up for desktop or down for mobile. On top of that, icon fonts are fully customizable, allowing you to easily adjust the size and edit the color to fit the layout and color scheme of a particular UI design.

Icon fonts are incredibly easy to add to any web design or mobile app project using CSS. You load the font file using @font-face, and using standard CSS rules, you can set the font-size, color, padding, margin, or other properties.

Although very popular, icon fonts do also have their pitfalls. Ian Feather has discussed his reasons for switching from an icon font to SVG, and CSS Tricks have outlined some considerations when choosing between icon fonts or SVG icons. Both favor SVG.

As a counter-argument, Pictonic has said that icon fonts are 10% faster than SVG. These are just things you should consider before you use icon fonts.

To ensure that your icons always load correctly and have reliable fallbacks for browsers that don’t support @fontface, you should take a look at the guidelines set out by the Filament Group, Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts.

The post 30+ Best Free Icon Fonts for UI Design in 2024 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

It’s just a matter of finding the icon set that best suits the requirements of your project. That’s where this collection comes in. If your web design project has taken a minimalist approach, you’re building a clean and simple mobile app, or you are looking for something a little more playful, you will find the icon set you need here.

Additionally, some icon sets have been designed for specific purposes, such as eCommerce, weather, or social media, making it easier to find relevant icons.

The curated collection of free icon sets we have for you below are available in various formats (SVG, PSD, AI, EPS, and Web Fonts) and for different UI applications, like Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD. All of the sets are free to download, with most allowing you to use them in both your personal and commercial projects, but please check the license before you usage.

With such a variety of free icon sets available, UI designers can find the perfect icons to fit their project’s style, tone, and purpose here.

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By using recognizable social media icons, you can make it easier to be found and followed on social media. Additionally, a consistent and professional icon design can improve the visual design of your UI.

There are many options for free social media icon sets. They come in various styles, sizes, colors, and formats, so you will need to pick the set that best fits the specific needs of your project.

In this collection, we have thirty professionally designed free social media icon sets to help narrow your search. They all include the icons and logos of all the major social media services – and some of the lesser-known – and come in various popular formats (icon fonts, Figma, Adobe XD, PSD, AI, EPS, Sketch, PNG, and SVG).

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Many mobile developers use gesture icon sets, or interaction icons, to show new users how to use a new application, or to bridge the learning gap of any new features, making them critical to a mobile application’s user experience and popularity.

By using standardized gesture icons, or interaction icons, across various operating systems (iOS & Android) and devices, designers can create UIs that are easy to use, thus making them user-friendly and accessible.

In this collection, we have fifteen free gesture icon sets for you. The gesture icons come in many different styles, sizes, and, most importantly, formats (Figma, Sketch, PSD, SVG, and EPS). And just like all free resources, please check the license of each icon set, as they can change from time to time.

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In this collection, we have selected twenty professionally designed payment method icon sets that you can freely use on your eCommerce site.

You will find free icon sets for all major payment gateways, including VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Cirrus, PayPal, BitCoin, and many more. They’re available in PNG, PSD, EPS, SVG, Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch. Who doesn’t love free icon sets?

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The problem is that there are many sites where you can download and use the national flag image of your choice, but most of these are pretty bland and basic and don’t offer the graphical expectations of modern web design. We need better.

What we have for you today is a small (as in the number of sets) yet extensive (as in the number of actual flag icons) collection of professionally designed country flag icons and banners that you can use for free on your own projects.

The post Top 10 Free Country Flag Icon Sets for Web Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

When it comes to designing icons, sketching remains an indispensable tool in the designer’s arsenal. To inspire you, we have curated a collection of the most impressive examples of icon sketching from designers across the web.

Don’t hesitate to peruse this collection and let your creativity run wild as you sketch your ideas. Enjoy the process, and happy sketching!

You might also like these collections of inspirational UI design sketches or logo sketches.

Mobile App Icon Sketch Andrey Maxim

MWood Logo Sketch Antonio Calvino

Substrate Sketches Benjamin Oberemok

Mobingi Sketching Phase Ramotion

Sketching Rates Net logo Tony Bar

Brick City Pets Sketch Stevan Rodic

Icon Sketching Trevor Nielsen

Map on Hover Sketch Eddie Lobanovskiy

iPhone App Icon Sketches Ramotion

Cornerstone Sketches v1 Mike Rhode

Vintage Camera Sketches Creative Mints

Postbox Pencil Sketches Mike Rohde

App Store Icon Sketch Artua

GoodNotes Icon in Process Eddie Lobanovskiy

Mac App Icon Sketches Ramotion

Video Editor Icon Sketch Eddie Lobanovskiy

iOS App Icons Sketches Jackie Tran

Cogsy Icon Sketches Loggia

Icon Ideas Sketches Jackie Tran

Mobile App Icon Sketches Creative Mints

The post 20 Inspiring Examples of Sketching in Icon Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Icons are easy to create, thanks to powerful software like Photoshop. With Photoshop, you can rapidly design stunning icons to use anywhere. It’s easy to do, and the app makes the process intuitive.

Want to get started? You’ve come to the right place. Below, we’ve gathered 30 of the very best Photoshop icon design tutorials from around the web. They span a vast array of creative designs and capture many learning styles. But they share a flexibility and ease of use that helps you learn and create your own icons quickly.

So, get ready to dive in and explore these fantastic tutorials. From app icons to shadows and business logos, there’s something for everyone. And you’ll see both written and video tutorials, so it’s easy to find guides that match your preferred learning style.

Before reading on, you might also enjoy our companion article, 20+ Tutorials for Creating Icons in Adobe Illustrator. Give it a read now for even more options inside a different Adobe app.

The post 30 Detailed Icon Design Tutorials for Adobe Photoshop appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Containing 50 icons in total, this set features a wide range of love-themed graphics, from hearts and roses to romantic dinners and wine. The icons come in both SVG and PNG formats, allowing you to use them in any size or format you prefer.

You can use this icon set freely in both personal and commercial projects, making it the perfect addition to your Valentine’s Day designs.

Whether creating a Valentine’s Day-themed website or designing a romantic gift for your significant other, these icons will surely add charm and personality to your project.

The Valentine’s Day Free Icon Set

Download the Valentine’s Day Icon Set

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In addition to being helpful to the user, these icons are just another level of polish designers and developers can apply to help a website stand out.

Our web design team has created an efficient toolkit to design and apply these useful icons in our client’s projects so that they appear consistently across platforms. We’d like to share with you our favicon production process, the development of our Icon Suite Photoshop template, and some of the trials and tribulations we’ve navigated so that you can create a beautiful, reliable favicon in your own web design projects.

Changes in the Favicon World

As favicons gained popularity, the number of cuts required to provide a great experience quickly grew. In order to streamline our process, we took a closer look at how modern mobile and desktop browsers and operating systems are using favicon assets.

These platforms drove our design team to reevaluate our approach, resulting in the creation of our Icon Suite. We found that all of the icons needed for a website can be created with only five cuts. (Note that the output created for iOS, Android Chrome, and Windows are doubled to ensure proper retina display).

Cuts 1 and 2: Favicon (16×16, 32×32) – This is the “classic” favicon shown in Bookmark menus and next to the current page’s address in many browsers.

Cut 3: iOS (180×180, the retina display is 96×96) – Beginning with iOS 3, Apple stopped looking for a hard-coded image filename and instead started using the largest image defined and scaling it down, which is why we’ve included the 180X180 and allow Apple devices to scale as needed. This narrows the assets needed for iOS in our Icon Suite down to a single image instead of 11.

Cut 4: Android Chrome (192×192, the retina display is 96×96) – As with Apple, Android recently began scaling the largest image down, minimizing the previous six images down to a single one.

Cut 5: Windows 8.1/10 (270×270, the retina display is 150×150) – Windows 8.1 – 10 utilize a handful of different tiles for their “metro” interface tiles, but we chose to optimize the medium square size as the highest-use scenario with acceptable performance when larger or smaller tiles were chosen.

In general, it is ideal to reduce the number of images whenever possible because some older browsers incorrectly grab all icons instead of the one most suited for the job. For a more comprehensive listing of favicon file types, take a look here.

Icon Suite Template Code

We’d like to share with you the implementation code we use. It allows each device to locate the correct favicon types needed on a given website. The following code is used in the <head> tag to identify all the needed components:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-title" content="JTech Communications" />
<meta name="application-name" content="JTech Communications" />
<meta name="msapplication-config" content=“/assets/icons/browserconfig.xml” />
<meta name="theme-color" content="#ffffff" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/assets/icons/apple-touch-icon-180.png" />
<link rel="manifest" href=“/assets/icons/manifest.json” />
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/assets/icons/favicon-32.png" sizes="32x32" />
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/assets/icons/favicon-16.png" sizes="16x16" />

The manifest.json file is a way to describe a web application that is used by Android Chrome. We are using the basic information (Reference site: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest):

{
"name":"JTech Communications”,
"icons": [
{
"src": "/assets/icons/android-chrome-192.png", "sizes": "192x192", "type": "image/png"
}
],
“theme_color":"#ffffff",
"display": "standalone"
}

The browserconfig.xml file is used by IE11 through Edge for the Windows 8.1/10 tiles.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <browserconfig>
        <msapplication>
            <tile>
                <square150x150logo src="/assets/icons/ms-tile-270.png" />
                <TileColor>#04283d</TileColor>
            </tile>
        </msapplication>
    </browserconfig>

Our Design and Production Process

To speed up our process, we’ve created a Photoshop template. The template utilizes smart objects to create a mock-up of the icons in the sizes we outlined above.

This way, we only have to create an icon once for each type: Favicon, Android, iOS, and Windows 8.1/10. Photoshop renders all of the various image cuts necessary for the home screen, browser window, etc.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

For iOS applications – because Apple rounds the corners for you, it is best to use a square image for the icon. If you want to do rounding yourself, you can use the recomposed image cut to tell Apple not to initiate rounding, but we suggest not bothering with this step.

For Windows – The Windows 10 tiles text poses a few problems. Windows icons include a medium and small tile sizes. The small tile is medium-sized halved and will not display a text title. It is important that an icon can adequately scale to the smaller tile dimension.

At first, we would offset the image to make room for the title placement but found that when the favicon was reproduced on smaller tiles without a label, it appeared misaligned. To avoid this behavior and minimize work, our current practice is to center it, so it doesn’t appear offset when there is no title and sizing it small enough, so it looks balanced with its title.

Here’s how our logo appears in a Windows tile with a title.

Windows 10 and 8/8.1 automatically assign the text color of the title based on the color of the background. To ensure the best results, we specify the background color, even if the favicon is a full-sized image with no transparency.

After modifying objects in our Photoshop template, our script outputs all of the specific cuts our developers need. I’ve provided the script below for your own use.

Download the jTech Photoshop Favicon Script

When it comes to their value, the favicon is another example of attention to detail. Not only are they a subtle way to enhance a company’s branding and improve the user experience, but they are a way to make a website visually distinct.

Although we sometimes battle browser configurations and OS upgrades, it is a small price to pay in order to perfect our customer’s projects, adding to the custom design and overall polish.

The post Modern Favicon Development Techniques & Best Practices appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.