We reached 4,000,000 icons 🎉
It’s now more important than ever to focus on quality over quantity
Last year in January, we crossed a three-million mark. Exactly one year later, we are celebrating 4,000,000 icons available on the Iconfinder marketplace.
We were extremely excited to count the first and the second millions. However, with every new million added, the celebration part becomes more subtle. Instead, it raises a question of how to make sure that our customers, designers, and we can make sense of this amount of content. It feels rewarding to be the largest icon library in the world, but it’s not about the total number anymore.
Our focus on content quality in 2019
Last year we took a bunch of steps to make sure the low-quality icons are not submitted, or if they are, they don’t get through our manual review process.
The icon designer report was one of the initiatives that we started at the doorstep of 2019 and continued throughout the year. This quarterly-published report gives Iconfinder contributors’ insights on supply and demand trends and highlights the areas of opportunity. For instance, one of the things we highlighted last year was a lack of diversity in icon design. We encouraged our contributors to be more inclusive when working on the concepts for icon sets.
The Iconfinder community forum was another major release driven by our Community Strategist Monica. The forum is a safe place for Iconfinder contributors to ask peers for feedback and share tips and inspiration. It is also a platform for us to communicate more closely with our icon designer community. We’ve been thrilled to see the initial wave of engagement, which confirmed that this kind of platform was very much needed.
Finally, the most recent improvement was related to the icon review process. As previously mentioned, our review is done manually by an experienced icon designer Bogdan. With the number of submissions not slowing down anytime soon, he has to stay thorough while dealing with a continually increasing amount of new content. To make his work more efficient, we released an admin feature allowing him to review similar sets from the same designer “in bulk”. It already shows signs of decreased review time, which means the new icons will reach the marketplace faster.
Next steps
We are proud of our little steps towards better content during 2019, but it doesn’t stop there.
A much-needed cleanup
During the years, our criteria for approving icons became stricter. What might have easily gone through in 2016 may no longer be accepted. For instance, we reject the majority of submissions in the outdated long-shadow style. However, we still have a significant amount of such icons that were submitted in the past. Some of them might still make sense to be kept, but a lot of them could be taken out to give more exposure to new icons in modern styles.
Another area to be revised is the relevance of the search results. All icons are being tagged by contributors. This means that every now and then, the search results include unrelated icons. We also have content that has been flagged due to various issues. All this needs to be fixed.
As a result, we are in the process of hiring a new team member who will focus on cleaning up the existing content. This will eventually mean a more pleasant and hassle-free search for customers. And contributors can rest assured they will have someone who sees the overall content ecosystem and can alert them in case the icons don’t match the needs of the current market. Yay!
Improving search
In January, we are making the first steps in changing our search setup. It will take some time until we can fully upgrade our search mechanism. However, when it’s done, it will give the users way more flexibility when it comes to search, which also means more exposure to the creator’s side. Search for sets, icon designers, and even personalized search is on our radar. All of these search features were mentioned when we surveyed our customers in 2019, and we can’t wait to fulfill these requests.
Icon design stars of 2019
Besides improving the existing content, we are also very excited to see what 2020 will bring us in terms of novelty. In 2019, we witnessed many extremely talented icon designers submitting top-quality content. We won’t be the same without you guys, so we would like to make a few honorable mentions.
🌟 Just Icon
🌟 Smalllike
🌟 Roundicons
🌟 Kokota
🌟 Maxicons
🌟 Microdot Graphic
🌟 Eucalyp Studio
🌟 Siwat V
We begin the new decade and the fifth million feeling positive that we could be better at presenting the amazing icons that we already have, as well as excited for the new emerging icon design stars. Cheers to that!
With đź’™,
The Iconfinder Team
