Designing Icons with Austin Andrews
Designing Icons with Austin Andrews
How do you design an icon? Even after having personally designed over 1500 icons, what still motivates you? How do you scale? Find out!
Hi everyone - I recently had a chance to sit down and chat with a friend I’ve known forever, Austin Andrews. Austin has been designing icons for most of his life. He has personally created over 1500 icons as part of the very popular icon library he started and now has a community of contributors at Pictogrammers to go even broader.
Watch our full conversation below:
This conversation is available to watch or listen to across a bunch of platforms like Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and more. Go here for the full collection of links.
My Top 3 Aha! Moments
When chatting with someone like Austin, who genuinely loves what he does and wants to share his talents with the world, there are many Aha! moments. Here are my three favorites:
1. Visual Basic FTW! (1:13)
Like so many developers who have a flair for UI-related activities, Austin’s first programming language was Visual Basic, later followed by Flash. The impact visual development tools have had in creating a generation of developers is often understated these days.
2. All of his icons are a single path (8:57)
When we think of icons, we think of a collection of shapes. They are still a collection of shapes, but the way Austin optimizes them is by making them a single path. For those of us who have wrangled with SVG can attest to how challenging that is, and Austin’s workflow (and an assortment of tools) for turning circles, rectangles, and other pre-defined shapes into a single path element is eye-opening.
3. AI is great at helping brainstorm and refine an idea (49:50)
Icon design is no different than the many other areas that AI is upending. One of the areas AI helps with is effortlessly creating variations:
The ideal workflow is one where we rely on AI assistants to create multiple variations of an idea. We then manually iterate and perfect a variation. Longer-tail activities like animation are also areas that AI hasn’t gotten to yet, so there is still human involvement needed.
Until Next Time
I hope you enjoyed this chat with Austin and found his passion for creating icons and building a successful community around it addictive.
Lastly, please do like or retweet this interview to help Twitter’s algorithm show it to more people:
See you all next time!
Cheers,
Kirupa 😎