Why you should consider a custom icon set
A lot of designers think that working in-house sounds boring compared to independent studios. OK, we don’t have free chocolate around every corner and beer in the office fridge in the middle of the week, so perhaps a bit more boring. But you’d be surprised by the variety of tasks an in-house designer does.
In Fortum we have a large number of products and services to work with. One very exciting part of the company is Valkea, Fortum’s growth club for digital clean energy ventures. They are working to grow the next generation of mission-driven startups, both internal and external. In Valkea’s portfolio you’ll find everything from CO2 removal platforms to industrial VR solution providers. Who needs chocolate when you can work with THIS!
Get to the point
Anyway. One of the companies in Valkea’s portfolio is the Berlin based scale-up Plugsurfing. They have established themselves as Europe’s leading, independent charging service for electric vehicles. They have over a million users to 250.000+ charging points. Plugsurfing contacted the Fortum Design team to help them out with some design challenges. They were growing fast and needed to update their visual identity and create a new app.
No way we’d turn down this opportunity! Our talented designers Gunnar, Johan and Mika did a great job with service design, UX, app design and visual identity improvements. During the process, Plugsurfing decided they would benefit from customised icons. I was super thrilled when they asked me to create an icon set from scratch.
Power to the icons!
Icons are often forgotten in a branding process. When we hear the words “visual identity”, people tend to think of typography, colours and imagery. In my opinion, icons should be equally important when defining a brand’s identity. They are often just as visible as other brand elements. Icons play an important part in communicating a message, or indicating actions and commands in a user interface.
All in all, icons have a unique way of increasing usability and bringing clarity. On top of that, brand customised icons may:
- bring emotions and personality to the brand
- add value and enhance the brand expression
- increase brand recognition
Of course, there are many good looking existing stock icon sets out there that might do the trick. But you would be very lucky to stumble upon a perfect match for your brand or service. Also, most companies have quite pointed business areas or products, that a lot of icon sets don’t cover. It’s time consuming to analyse and recreate the style for your custom icons.
Icon styles that fit the brand
Speaking of analysing. Let’s take a look at some other brand’s icons and what they are trying to express.
Spotify’s icons are sophisticated, simple, light and elegant. A bit playful but not too friendly with modest rounded corners.
When you put this much effort into the icon design, it’s a shame when it’s not followed in every part of the UI, like here, where there’s a good mix of filled and outline style, different strokes and corner radiuses:
Evernote’s icons are very friendly. The unnatural construction in some of the details (e.g. house with rounded corners on the walls) makes them informal, and the round corners adds some balance and softness. In general, round corners in UI are perceived as more friendly and more tempting to interact with. In the side menu they appear a bit techie with their filled style.
Klarna’s icons are bold, quirky and original, with their thick strokes, mix of rounded and sharp corners, not to mention highly angular shapes. This style really fits the rest of the brand; awkward photos, statement font and weird colour combinations.
Finding the right style for the Plugsurfing icons
First I found some icon examples from other brands and apps, and analysed them. We agreed that something like Klarna’s icon style would be too quirky, but we liked the friendliness. We liked the clean and simple expression in Spotify’s icons, but found it too sophisticated for the Plugsurfing brand. The icons in the Norwegian online grocery store Oda had a good combination of characteristics that we loved and wanted to adopt: tasteful and artistic, yet friendly and playful:
Spoiler alert
Ta-da! Here’s the result for Plugsurfing. Didn’t see that coming, huh? Well, if you’re a geek like me and want to know more about the entire design process, learn how to create an icon set from scratch here.
After this process, Plugsurfing has taken the brand renewal one step further together with the brand agency Werklig. The icons I made are used in the new Plugsurfing app, but I think the expression in the app and on the new website is quite divergent. In other words, yes, you get some cool challenges working inhouse, but independent studios are unfortunately often more trusted by stakeholders. On the other hand, working in independent studios might not be as stable as working inhouse. And inhouse you don’t have to deal with pitches that never sees the light of day on a regular basis! I bet Werklig have chocolate around every corner and beer in the office fridge though.
One lesson learnt is that if it’s possible, wait with the icon design process until the strategy and branding process is more settled. Either way, I would encourage you to consider icons more as part of the branding process. It could really make a difference in your brand storytelling and help the design stand out.
