Some people are really good at designing icons. However, those of us from Earth find it tricky to say the least. This is a shame, as a web application can be made or broken by the quality of its interface and currently a major part of any interface is its icons. So what’s a girl to do?
You can try designing your own. It’s at this point you realize that 16×16 pixels isn’t so big. You quickly find that anything detailed comes out as a blob, and anything simple comes out as a blob. Unless you’re looking to design an icon for the user to invoke the blob command, you’re somewhere short of your goal. So you decide to get outside help.
You try to find a freelancer or contractor to design some icons. Any freelancer or contractor you ask will claim that they can design icons. Every freelancer or contractor will deliver you a collection of 80 icons for invoking the blob command.
Face it. Unless you have someone on your team who is the bastard child of Picasso and Rothko in miniature, or you happen to know a freelancer who can show you an accomplished portfolio of non-blobs and understands the meaning of the phrase we’re working to a budget here, you should should give up. Go visit IconExperience or IconBuffet, and quit worrying about icons for good.
Comments
Not to pimp our own wares on your site (if this seems to commercial, feel free to delete the post), but I have to say I’m partial to our stock icons at IconBuffet.
We are a wee bit pricier than IconExperience, but the quality of the work speaks for itself.
I also found IconPacks on my own travels and it does particularly nice 16×16 icons that appear sharper than most, although they didn’t have the variety I needed overall.
icons? They have over 2000 and they are all good.