We reached 5,000,000 icons
Securing our title as the world’s largest icon marketplace 🎉
It’s hard to believe that when I started working at Iconfinder at the end of 2015, we were just a bit more than halfway to our first million icons. As soon as we reached one million in 2016, things escalated pretty quickly. Every new million was added faster than the one before. And now, we are at this beautiful milestone — 5,000,000 tiny graphics are being shuffled and sorted by our search engine every day.
How long does it take to add one million icons?
Good question. It took us 9 years to add the very first million. Guess how long it took to progress from four to five millions? 11 months!
You might know that all icons on Iconfinder are uploaded by independent icon designers from all over the world. We speculate that the situation in 2020 have encouraged even more designers to look for new sources of passive income. And that’s where a platform like us steps in, helping the artists to start selling their artwork to customers worldwide.
Why velocity in new content matters
More niches covered
More icons means we are getting better at covering niche topics. Every quarter, my colleague Monica sends our contributing icon designers a new report, where she presents data of people’s search behaviour. For example, what people are searching for but are not able to find on the site. This helps us gather icons about the most unique topics.
“I couldn’t believe I would find icons for sharpening studio because this is not a popular business. However, we handled everything in production, thanks to your unbelievable collection.”
Customer quote from our recent survey.
Quick to react to trends
Whenever we reach out to our contributors about increased demand for a particular topic, we see the content appearing incredibly quickly — typically, a couple of days after publishing a report or making an inquiry. This makes time-to-market very short and allows us to stay on top of the emerging trends.
When the pandemic started spreading worldwide in March, we were able to promptly launch a page with loads of free coronavirus icons for people to download and use for signs, posters, and infographics. We were pleased to see how quickly our contributors shifted to themes like hygiene requirements, social distancing, or remote work.
More content, more challenges
Time will only tell how long it will take us to add the next million. But we don’t see it as a race. In fact, each new million adds more responsibilities. We need to reduce the clutter, push for higher quality standards, and make sure people have an easy time finding that one perfect icon they came looking for. Let me walk you through how we approach these challenges.
Reducing the clutter
Being in the market for so many years means we have some legacy elements on our website that are no longer meaningful. Dieter Rams has famously said:
“One of the most significant design principles is to omit the unimportant in order to emphasize the important.”
That’s the mantra we apply when making improvements to our interface.
You may have noticed the new, simplified look of our homepage. We went minimal, focusing on the primary purpose you are coming our way — the search.
We are currently reworking the icon categories and styles to make them clearer and intuitive for someone who just opened Iconfinder for the first time. New tools built with artificial intelligence are helping us with tedious labeling work, so we can scale fast without compromising the neat organization of the content.
Bumping up the quality
Our quality standards have changed immensely since the early days, not to mention the excel of the design techniques and styles. My colleague Sara reviews the older content and sends some outdated icons for a well-deserved rest. Those icons can still be found in the download history, but they are hidden from the search results.
Making it easier to find the right icon
Since the beginning of the year, all the way to the final refinements in the fall, we have been upgrading our search engine. If it was a good, reliable Toyota before, we dare to say we went all Tesla now. Massively improved load speed, multiple-word searches, handling of misspellings, search sorting — that’s just some of the recent improvements.
Perhaps the most anticipated search upgrade was allowing to search within a designer, category, icon family, or a set. For example, you can now go into Gan Khoon Lay’s profile and search for all his icons related to UFO.
A thank you note to our designers
“Together with passionate icon designers, we are building the largest icon marketplace in the world.”
This is how we’ve been expressing our mission in the past several years. That first part of the sentence is the key — we wouldn’t be here if not for the 4,000 hardworking icon designers, trusting our team and our platform. We push each other to become better at serving the ever-changing customer needs, and we are pleased to be partners with every single one of them. Here’s to the next million!
