Icons

Lots of Work

Many icon websites publish freebies created by a bunch of different artists and contributors. However, at Icons8 all of our icons are produced in-house.

And we draw a lot: Creating a few dozen icons might not be a big deal, but producing the thousands of icons we have up to this point, has taken five years of daily work.

80% Coding; Only 20% Drawing

Unlike many other websites that merely have a collection of icons available for download, Icons8 offers much more than that:

• • Web app generates icons in any color, size, and format.
  • Complete customization: Add text, overlays and a background to any icon before downloading.
  • Both Windows and Mac Apps perform mostly the same functions on your desktop.
  • There’s a massive backend behind the scenes.

Backend: A Day in the Life of an Icon

Publishing an icon pack is not a problem for many icon designers: You compress the files, and that’s it.

Here’s what happens to every icon on Icons8.

1. 1. For insights and inspiration, our top requests for icons, as well as our analytics are taken into consideration.
      
      Our internal analytics tool. Look, the Filled Circle is one of the top icons and we miss a color circle.

1. Designers distribute the work and brainstorm the ideas during our daily standup session.
2. They then upload SVG icons to our server using a custom admin panel. There, we have an automatic tool that compares these icons with all the existing ones. If a similar icon is found, we assign it automatically.
3. We publish the icons on our website. Now, you can do with them whatever you want: Download them via CDN, generate fonts, recolor, or customize.
4. The icons are immediately available to our API partners.
5. A few hours after the upload, the icons become available on our desktop apps for Mac and Windows.
6. Sorting: We log the searches and downloads. This is one of the criteria we use to improve search results.
7. Filtering: We have a console that allows us to filter the icons for the most popular searches manually. If you search for a key or home, the results are sorted manually.

Fugue

Fugue is a collection of music for videos, and it’s our best ProductHunt launch so far.

A video with Fugue music track

Crowd-Sourced

Unlike our other projects, we don’t create Fugue. Instead, we discover the artists and help them to publish their work. For artists, Fugue is invitation-only.

Picky

With other marketplaces, you’ll find great music… on page 17 of your search results. Fugue is much, much pickier than that. We have two musicians on staff listening to tons of lousy music every day (so you don’t have to).

Unsplash for Music

Fugue is much more affordable than… anything else. Essentially, Inc. Magazine called us “Unsplash for music,” which is essentially free.

Lunacy

Lunacy is a graphic design software for Windows. It’s fully compatible with Sketch.

Sketch for Windows

Bohemian Coding provides us with the early releases of Sketch. A significant part of our work is testing Lunacy against all the new features they have to offer. Multi-layered dashed borders? We have them.

Speed up Work

There are about a dozen designers at Icons8, so we have no lack of frustration with our current tools. Still, we do rigorous usability testing.

Magic

There’s a team that makes magic in Lunacy. The amount of magic is the criteria for their work. These could be small features like CDN export or the avatar tool. The larger plan is suggesting the next step for designers; there’s a lot of predictive analytics there.

Moose

Moose Photos is disrupting the stock photography world. The idea is to take:

• 100 photos of people
• 100 objects
• 100 backgrounds

…And compose them into one million images.