Week 4 Page 7: Icons
Icons: The New Trend in Navigation!
With the advent of smaller and smaller screens, designers have had to come up with slicker methods of creating quick access to content. One of the latest trends is icons!
Icons have the benefit of being small and quickly recognizable. The most important consideration when using icons is to make sure you are using them in the expected and standardized way. Keep your audience in mind! Remember that some people may not understand what an icon means! Have you had this happen to you? I certainly have!
Let's play a little icon recognition game!
How did you do on the icon identification game?!
Icons as Design Tools
In addition to being helpful navigational aids, icons are also useful design tools! They can add character to a design, liven up boring lists, and separate blocks of text to make reading more appealing.
If you want to use icons in a design, there are a variety of free icon sets you can access and download. Here are a few resources:
- http://www.flaticon.com/ Links to an external site.
- http://glyphicons.com/ Links to an external site.
- http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/ Links to an external site.
Examples of sites using icons:
Take a quick look at these sites. How are the icons being used? Is the use good or bad?
- http://www.pygmy-elephant.com/ Links to an external site.
- http://www.rybdesign.com.ar/index.html Links to an external site. (Look at the contact section at the bottom!)
- https://booneselections.com/ Links to an external site.
- http://www.iuvo.si/ Links to an external site.
And now for some final navigation tips!!