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7 Principles of Icon Design

Clarity, Readability, Alignment, Brevity, Consistency, Personality, Ease of Use.

Helena Zhang
UX Collective
10 min readJan 29, 2020

Creating a high-quality icon family requires a thoughtful approach, a trained eye, a bit of iteration, and a lot of practice. Below, I’ll illustrate the hallmarks of quality through 7 principles and plenty of real-world examples. The goal is to tune you to the key attributes of great icon design.

Clarity

An icon’s primary goal is to communicate a concept quickly.

Icons on a Prius Prime instrument cluster (Source: 2020 Manual)

In this flurry of symbols, which are clear to you? Drivers learn these over time, but many are unintuitive; you need a manual to decipher their meaning.

Here’s roughly how they stack up for me:

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