Icons are a language, not a decoration
A symbol only works when the audience has already agreed what it means.
4 min readVisual Communication
Convention beats invention
The floppy disk means save to people who have never touched one. Inventing a more accurate symbol would be less communicative, which is a hard sentence for designers to accept.
Test without labels
Show an icon set with the labels removed. Anything that needs its label is illustration, and should keep the label permanently.
Draw the family, not the icon
Consistent stroke weight, corner radius and optical size matter more than any single drawing. A set that agrees with itself reads faster than a set of individually better icons.
A set that agrees with itself reads faster than a set of individually better drawings.
—Try this
Remove every label from your product's navigation for an hour and note which items you still hesitate over.