It is common for designers to spend a considerable amount of time to create and add value to products. Often times they stumble upon hurdles pertaining to the scarcity of good design elements, whether for UI and UX or any other element required for a great resultant product. Icons8 caters to overcoming these adversities by providing designers with all the required elements, for free.
Conceived in 2012 by Ivan Braun, a UI designer, who also plays the role of the founder and CEO, Icons8 enables designers to express ideas by giving them the right design elements at the right time. The graphic designing company is of an evident opinion that creators often have to waste too much time, effort or money on some visual details of their projects, which could be used for bigger purposes. The solution for this is the Icons8 library which delivers quality contents to designers and implementation of predictive analytics to creating process.
A Disruptive Offering
By creating the resources and software for designers, Icons8 helps amateur and professional designers to class up their projects by providing constant quality resources, software that speeds up their work up to 10 to 30 times. The detailed list of Icons8’s products is as follows:
Icons: The Icon Library saves time for UI and web designers, who struggle searching for matching icons for their projects. Icons8 allows them to get all icons they need in a single style (out of 15+ styles) in minutes. Additionally, users can request icons they are missing for free, and recolor icons in a couple of clicks.
Illustrations: The Ouch! illustration library helps creators who don’t draw, overcome the lack of quality graphics and boring content. Icons8 collected illustrations of typical UX screens (404 pages, Message sent, etc.) from top Dribble artists in 16 styles and paid them so that creators could get quality graphics for free or for an affordable price.
Music: Fugue is a stock music library for videos. Unlike other larger collections, Fugue offers higher quality audio. Inc. magazine called it “Unsplash for music.” Users can save the music in MP3 format (free; requires a link) or in a lossless WAV format (for a fee; no linking requirement).
Photos: Moose is a microstock photography library and a web tool that allows users to combine the models, objects, and backgrounds into realistic collages and photos. It helps users to get a photo for their specific purpose in minutes without any special skills. Plus, all photos were created in-house, with the same light, and style. They are easy to combine in one project.
Editing: Lunacy is a free vector graphics editor that reads and saves the documents in the Sketch format. It allows Windows users to work with .sketch files and eliminates the gap between them and also designers and developers who use Sketch on Mac. Moreover, Lunacy simplifies the creating process by giving possible next step suggestions to the creator.
The most evident benefits that Icons8 users receive is that they save their time by getting exactly the content they need quickly (single styles, tags and categories made by one team, opportunity to edit content in-app) and effortlessly, and by having a single style to choose the content from. Icons8 Users get access to the content (illustrations, music) picked for them by professionals (that otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to get without paying a lot). Constantly growing content libraries is one added benefit for users as each month they are delivered more for the same price as before (or for free for a link).
Keeping up the competitive edge
Icons8 follows a problem-solution approach towards sustaining its market competency and continuing its cutting edge offerings. The first instance of which is the problem of inefficient marketplaces, wherein a primitive model exists of reselling the files. Due to this primitive nature of this business, it’s crowded which means stock photo websites have to spend 50-80% of revenue on marketing. Icons8’s solution to this is creating the content. The company created 90% of its icons and shot 95% of all photos, organized it; from tagging and captioning to big data analysis and also developed the tools to deliver them faster.
Another prominent problem that Icons8 envisions to deplete is designers spending a significant extent of time doing routine work. Icons8 comprehends that a designer’s work mostly consists of editing properties and adjusting the distances which costs them a lot of time. The solution to this, created by Icons8, is automation and predictive analytics. The users can experience the effects building-in on the icons app while creating an icon. Pichon, a companion app makes adding icons to designs quick and effortless. Lunacy, another tool which is under the testing phase, tries to guess the next step of the user. It analyzes that if the user created a small long rectangle, and predicts that it might be a button? It then displays the buttons from those designs which the user already created, as well as from the installed UI kits.
Blueprints of the future
Icons8 envisions changing the industry by easing the creating process for users with predictive analytics, automatization, quality content and an opportunity to edit it for their specific purposes simply and swiftly, instead of an endless search, wasting time and/or money. It also aims at allowing content producers to reach the customers directly through Lunacy – users incorporate the photos/illustrations directly into their design, without middle-men and competition.
The company also plans to develop new products, pertaining to bringing content suggestion to a new level: auto-suggesting the content that matches the design (‘IntelliSense for design’) and past behavior (‘Netflix for design elements’) in Lunacy. Icons8 additionally plans to develop generative photos to give creators a tool to change faces, emotions, age, skin color, etc., thus to enlarge diversity. Thus with thousands of models, objects and backgrounds one can have a billion of photos as a result.
URL: icons8.com