Our Icon Design Process
Our icon design process is built for software teams who need clarity, consistency, and control, whether you need 20 icons for a website UI or 2,000 for a complex software platform.
If you’re looking for bespoke icons for your software or UI, see our bespoke icon design services.
The step-by-step icon design process
- Starting the project, what we need, what you get back
- Style development, creating your unique visual language
- Production at scale, consistency across large icon sets
- Delivery and support, formats, handover, and ongoing support
1. Starting the project: fast clarity, low friction
Most icon projects start with a quick review of your product, often an online call where you can talk us through the UI and core processes, or just UI screenshots can be enough, and a short discussion about the users and the environment your software lives in. We often work in CAD, engineering, data analysis, pharma and industrial software,where clarity and consistency matter more than decoration.
If you are refreshing an existing UI, we can evolve your current icon language, or redesign it from scratch. If you are starting from a mixed set of stock icons, we can match them, improve them, or replace them with a coherent bespoke set.
What we ask for
- UI screenshots or a short walkthrough video call
- A list of key areas, toolbars, menus, ribbons or panels
- Your current icon set, if one exists
- Brand guidelines, colours, or accessibility requirements
- Preferred delivery formats, e.g. SVG, PNG, ICO, XAML or BMP
What you get back
- A clear scope and a suggested approach, pacing and milestones
- Style direction options, based on your UI and audience
- Practical advice on what will improve usability fastest
- Transparent commercial terms, including deposit before work starts and a final invoice on delivery
2. Style development: rules that scale
Style development is where we turn your requirements into a clear visual system. We explore shape language, perspective, stroke weights, corner radii, colour usage, and how secondary marks, overlays, and status indicators behave.
The goal is not to make a few nice icons. It is to define a visual system that keeps the entire set consistent as it grows. Once we agree a direction, refinement is systematic. This is one of the main differences between a few isolated icons and a large, production ready icon system.
What we deliver
- One or more designers produce several concepts based on a small subset of your icons
- Your preferred concepts will be refined through a number of revisions to arrive at a final approved style
- All future icons will follow the same visual language
- We can create an optional Style Reference Document to help maintain consistency across larger projects and multiple designers
If you have an existing style you need to match, we can build rules around that too, then steadily improve clarity and consistency.
Early concepts explore structure and meaning. Once a direction is agreed, refinement becomes a repeatable system across the full icon set.
3. Production at scale: consistent output, calm delivery
Once the style rules are defined, production is about speed, consistency, and control. This is where many projects fail. Ad hoc processes, single designers, or loosely coordinated freelancers all introduce risk at scale.
Large csutom icon sets need organised asset management, clear naming, consistent review, and reliable handover. Without this, quality drifts and progress slows. With it, hundreds or thousands of icons can be produced quickly without losing consistency or control.
This is also where our in house platform makes a difference. Icon Manager keeps everything tidy, trackable, and easy to approve.
Icon Manager: managing large icon projects
We manage icon projects differently from typical freelancers or generalist design agencies, using a purpose-built system designed specifically for icon production at scale.
- Transparency and Accountability with designers and stakeholders in direct communication
- Review, version tracking, comments and approval, all recorded and available throughout the project
- Powerful filtering, statistics and live emails upon update keep project progress clear and easy to follow
- All Icon assets are downloadable at any time for testing or final delivery
Find out more about Icon Manager
Working with creative freedom was fun and effective, made better by possibly the most efficient project management system I have yet to work with, Icon Manager. The project was delivered on time in full and the creative freedom team were very flexible in accommodating any changes
Andrew Holm
4. Delivery and support: formats, ownership, next steps
You receive clean, production ready icon assets in the formats your UI needs, with consistent naming and sensible folder structure. If you are integrating icons into a desktop application, web interface, or plugin ecosystem, we can deliver variants that fit each environment.
And that doesn’t just mean delivering generic SVGs. Different environments have their own specifications and quirks, so we tailor output to your system, from SVG structure to colour handling and styling. Where needed, we deliver SVG XML optimised for control over sizing, colour, and behaviour.
That experience gives teams confidence that what’s delivered will integrate cleanly and scale without surprises.
You own the delivered artwork, and rights transfer on final payment. As your software evolves, we can extend the set, at any time. We create reliable long-term partnerships that have spanned decades and can pick up a legacy project and drop in perfectly matching icons, immediately. This is why companies requiring hundreds or thousands of icons initially, like Hexagon, Aveva, Synopsys, QinetiQ, Zuken and many others, keep returning as software functionality expands and we are always ready to assist.
Typical custom icon deliverables
Deliverables are tailored to your platform and workflow, not bundled or generic.
- SVG for modern UI and web applications
- PNG for raster toolbars and legacy environments
- ICO for Windows desktop scenarios
- XAML and other platform specific formats, when needed
- Optional light and dark theme variants
Icon Design Process FAQs
- 🧩 Can you match an existing icon style?
- Yes. We can match your current style closely, then improve consistency and clarity as we expand the set. If the existing style is holding the UI back, we can propose a controlled evolution rather than a disruptive redesign.
- 🏗️ Do you handle large icon libraries?
- Yes. Anything from a small set for a focused UI refresh to hundreds or thousands of icons for enterprise software. Our workflow is built for scale, including clear rules, review, and organised delivery.
- 📐 How do you keep icons consistent across a large set?
- We define a style system early, then produce icons using shared grids and repeatable rules. Our Icon Manager platform keeps versions, feedback, and approvals tidy so the set does not drift.
- 📁 What file formats do you supply?
- Most projects use SVG and PNG, but we also deliver ICO, XAML, BMP and other formats where required. We will recommend a practical deliverable set based on your platform and UI framework.
- 🔐 Who owns the final artwork?
- You do. Rights transfer on final payment. We may ask permission to show selected icons in our portfolio.
