How to design a suitable icon for your product on Android

If you have finished your app, you will definitely announce it to others immediately. But you need to pay attention to one very important issue, that is the app icon. Your icon may have been designed before the project started, but I don’t like this. If the app is not finished, the icon is actually useless. If you are not a designer, icons are really a headache.

But there are always ways for engineers to design good icons independently. Let's take Android applications as an example and design a suitable icon for your product.

Prepare

Before designing, you should check out the iconography reference guides, which are a tutorial on icon design on the Android Developers website.

Tip: The design in this link is based on Android 4.4 Kitat. If you want to design in Android L style, you can't rely on it.

Google officially launched Android L at the I/O 2014 Developer Conference on June 26, 2014. It can be said to be the most significant upgrade of the Android system since its launch in 2008.

Android L generates icons in a different style from KitKat. Material Design simplifies the design, focusing on clean typography and simple layout, while incorporating rich colors and having stronger directionality. In addition, it also supports a variety of devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, computers, TVs, etc., covering almost the entire Android product line, with a high degree of uniformity.

Let's create an icon based on the Android L style.

Create an Icon

At this point, let's assume that we already have a rough icon model. Here I decided to use a more special icon. I found the Open labs icon in the open source library, as shown in the figure below. I plan to make an Android L style based on it.

We don't need these texts, just cut out the icons. Then what we need to do is to choose the color. There are many considerations for the choice of color. Too many colors may cause confusion. We must take care of the icons at any size. Everyone should know that the most troublesome ones are the small icons on the label cards.

We change it through space and color. We will use icons in various situations, so it should also have several icons with different details. For example, when displaying icons in the notification bar, it is not appropriate to have borders. The first icon in the picture below will be a good choice.

We may also need rounded edges and filled square borders, and we can enhance the effect through shadows, which is to darken the color of a certain area.

After simple processing, the icon becomes like this:

As you can see, you can choose the appropriate icons in different places, and they look very three-dimensional.

*** can be saved in 512*512 PNG format (the highest icon resolution available in Android). You can use some third-party tools to save it in versions of various sizes.

You can also use the Android version of Eclipse to automatically generate icons of different sizes directly in the resource folder.

How to implement? Using Material?

It has to be said that we still need to wait for a few months to enjoy the charm of Material design and Android L. But you can prepare in advance and think about which app you want to design an Android L-style icon for and what it will look like.