Iconic Illustration

Quick, picture the Twitter bird. Now the iOS message bubble. Pretty easy, right? How about this: if I were to put a “download here” link at the end of this post, what type of icon would you expect to see next to it? Something like this, maybe?

Point is, icons are everywhere. A picture is worth a thousand words, and all that. Never is this more true than in web design. If you follow our work you’ll notice that there are certain elements that we consistently use on our sites, one of them being icons. Often, we strategically place them in or around content that we want to draw attention to. Many times a user will come to a site that is extremely content heavy, which can be intimidating. Having small visual indicators can really help a user quickly find the information that is important to her.

Icons serve a handful of very important functions, including grabbing visitor attention, punching up lists, and just plain making content more interesting in general. A few examples in practice:

When we built the ChatterBlast Media site, we used unique iconography to very quickly convey not just their services, but also the key industries that they work in. Visitors to the page are very quickly able to figure out what the crack social media team over at ChatterBlast can do for them, and additional icons make contact options very clear.

The Philly Ad Club website, home base for one of the regions largest and most active trade organizations, leverages custom icons in various places across the site, but the Current News list stands out. We used unique icons to help readers immediately determine what type of news item they’re looking at, and to make granular sorting and control of the news feed easier.

Finally, even a relatively simple site like DVREDF can be made more visually appealing with icons. In this case big, bold icons are integrated into the homepage to make the three main sections immediately clear and inviting.

Iconography and its uses have been the subject of tons of posts by lots of very smart, creative people. Around here, we like to think of them the same way we think of just about everything else: as tools for conversion. If the goal of a site is to get people to fill out a form we don’t just drop in a block of text saying "fill out this form," we're probably gonna give you a visual prompt. When it comes down to it, the object of most websites is to get people to click a button to buy now, fill out a form, or contact someone, and our experience has taught us that adding an icon can make a huge difference. So we’re gonna continue to use ‘em. In fact, we’re working on a few brand new ones right this second.

What about you? Any unique uses of icons you particularly like? Any situations where you feel icons may not be an appropriate choice? We’d love to hear from you.