Throughout history, icons have been used to present ideas and concepts. For example, look at hieroglyphs. Each symbol represents a different word or idea. This is essentially what icons and logos are today. Take a look at your iPhone or Android, Windows, or Mac. All of your programs are launched by icons which are designed to remind you of the function they perform.
I remember one solution I developed for a company that had just started using multiple internet based applications. They wanted to put shortcuts on the desktop, but it quickly became confusing for the users because all of the shortcuts used the default IE shortcut icon. IE shortcuts do have a small set of alternate default icons you can choose, but they all suck. I started using Photoshop to make my own custom set and began redirecting all Internet Explorer homepages to a custom intranet server that I ran in our tech shop. I had placed a simple html table with 5 rows of 2 columns populated with all of the internet enabled apps and my custom icons. This was a home run! In fact, when the company was taken over, the new company integrated my simple design concept into their overall corporate intranet!
In may not work on every site you create, but consider using icons as part of your navigation menus. This is especially true when creating sites and apps for the mobile world; icons are perfect for this concept when creating apps for smaller handheld devices.
DISCLAIMER: I am not telling you to purchase the products I mention. I am merely telling you about the products that I use, why I think they are useful, and how I have benefited from their use. When possible, I do use affiliate links. Why? Because, as much as I enjoy writing and talking about my ideas, experiences, and various other information products, I don’t get paid to do it. I think this probably annoys my wife, so any extra buck that may come from the occasional referral can go to flowers for her and one less night in the dog house for me!
So yes, I use affiliate links, but only for products that I have used, and that I believe in. If you choose to purchase through one of my links, I certainly appreciate your support and thank you.
As mentioned before, I have used Adobe Photoshop to hand create my icons, but there are other programs to do this quicker. Axialis IconWorkshop will allow you to rapidly develop icons using common shapes and templates to allow you to craft stunning icons in virtually no time. IconWorkshop also has Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator plugins to you round trip your work between these two most common graphics editors.
The benefit of using IconWorkshop is that it allows you to create icons for the following formats:
•Windows Icon (ICO)
•Macintosh Icon (ICNS)
•Bitmap Image, iPhone, Android Icon
•Image Strip for Toolbars
•Icon Library (ICL)
•Icon from Photoshop Template
Icons for Email, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds.
I created this contact image strip in about two minutes using IconWorkshop!
Even this image strip proves my point. The Facebook and Twitter icons/logos are unmistakable and you know exactly where these icons should take you. The entire company is represented in this tiny little graphic. Behold the power of icons!
Now, Photoshop and Illustrator are MUCH more robust for graphics creation, but are also MUCH more expensive and time consuming to learn. At any rate, they are the de facto standard in the graphics world and I would recommend, at least, acquiring a demo of these two programs to see if they will work for you. Update: Adobe is releasing a new service called Creative Cloud that will allow you (for a $49 monthly fee) access the newest version of all of their CS6 applications. Check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html?promoid=JQPER
Not everyone is a designer, and sometimes it is just more cost effective to have someone else do the hard work for you. Why reinvent the wheel?
iStockphoto.com provides photos, illustrations, video, audio, and flash animations at reasonable rates.
99designs.com lets you work with graphic artists to design your own logos and graphics.