Thumbnail icons have proliferated over the years. They are found on most digital devices from laptops to mini-tablets. Icons are small pictures or symbols displayed on a monitor as a gateway to open software applications. Favicons bring out the aesthetics of a website when placed on a sidebar menu, providing easily recognizable images. From a digital standpoint, icons serve an important role in user interface design.
Designing a readable icon is still quite the challenge. Website developers must consider the universally accepted meaning behind certain images and labels. Icons are great for highlighting what your business does or pointing out the different software tools. And yet, adding too many icons would confuse the reader into thinking they are placed on the site as decorations. One way to customize icons to your liking is to use an Icon generator.
Prefinem's Simple Icon Generator shows how icons are made in Adobe Photoshop. There are many elements to adjust to determine an icon's appearance. The Simple Icon Generator lets you select the basic shape of the icon, the labeling text, and the style of Font. Here are some of the main features you can mess around with:
Web designers are always on the lookout for new methods of altering the visual aspect of an icon. As expected, they've been testing out the icon generator by uploading their own creations. Prefinem, in response, is gathering valuable feedback from the users who have pointed out a few of its flaws such as the lack of an option to have a transparent background or the need to implement an API.
Another visual problem had to do with the previews for their list of Google fonts. People have suggested that the text must align with the center of an icon regardless of the shape. Having extra lines to fit more text would be better but a live preview of the layout in different fonts will save developers time. It's evident that optimizing an icon is no simple task after all.