Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Learn Iconography

Icons are symbolic representation of the content in the website. Design is all about communication: it doesn’t matter how important or exciting the information that you’re sharing. When initially viewing a website, most users will first scan the page for visually interesting content, and only after something grabs their attention will they actually begin reading. Icons are a simple, effective way to draw users into the content of your website.


flat-icons-samples

Icons serve the same psychological purpose as paragraph breaks: they visually break up the content, making it less intimidating. A well-formatted page, with text broken into easily accessible paragraphs and accented by icons, is easy to read and visually interesting enough to sustain the user’s attention. So, stop wasting time writing so much content that no one will read, and start using icons!

Here are some of the best practices of using icons to support content in web design. Please feel free to take a look at the showcases of navigation menus, search boxes, block quotes and web forms.

Icons make the user to understand the content design in easier manner. In simpler words, icons can reduce complexity in the content.

1.) Use simple and appropriate icons for the content.

2.) List features, characteristics, services and other listing information content can added with suitable icons.

3.) A UI designer must know placement of icons and where to use of icons in the content.

4.) Icon-size is more important. According to design elements, icon size can be fixed by designer. 
     a.) In case of header, icons can be in the minimum size of 15x15 to 25x25. 
     b.) In case of icons in content area, icons can be in the minimum size of 20x20 to 50x50.

5.) Simple flat icons and material icons are mostly  used in web design industry.

6.) Usage of icon web fonts in the webdesign in trending the web design and application layouts.

7.) Time to load icons and web icon fonts are very minimal and so the website performance is more better.

And that's all for iconography. If an UI designer follows these rules, the layout will rule the industry for long withstand. In forthcoming articles, we can discuss about other related topics in web design.


Source: smashing magazine

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