It’s Monday night and you’re a little bored, scrolling on your phone. You open the app store to see if there’s a fun app worth downloading; maybe a game or something to read. You start searching and get flooded with choices: thousands of apps match the query you typed in. You skim the top few options and pick the app that speaks to you most. And the reason that particular app grabs you? Probably because the icon pops, or because it looks familiar. When you need an app icon for your own app, the one that pops has to be yours, of course! In the sea of apps, you want yours to stand out. And it really is a sea of apps…
Apps galore!
Statista reported that in 2018 the Apple App Store offered around 2 million apps, and the Google Play Store around 2.1 million. The company also reported that in 2018 roughly 205.4 billion apps were downloaded, with an expected 258.2 billion downloads in 2022. Quite the growth spurt! With such a massive supply of apps, an app really has to be able to compete. Otherwise it vanishes into the crowd of everything on offer, and that’s obviously not the plan! Making a good first impression is key here. And you do that, naturally, with a great app icon! But what should you look out for?
Simple and minimal
Keep it simple, stupid! This little mantra gets thrown around a lot in the design world, and it stands for simplicity and minimalism. When designing an app icon this matters a lot; an icon has precious little space, after all. That limited surface should never look too busy. The user needs to grasp the app at a single glance, and if the icon is cluttered, that just won’t happen. So minimal icons are often better than really busy ones. Take a look at the apps on your own phone. Most of them probably have a simple, calm icon!
“You want to avoid a bad first impression, obviously”
Luxe looks
If an app icon looks cheap, people will think poorly of the app. The user assumes the app can’t be any good because the icon looks cheap. That’s a first impression you want to dodge, of course. Just think of how many apps you didn’t download because of a cheap-looking icon! So the app icon has to look good. How do you pull that off? Get yourself a great designer! Someone with experience who keeps up with the times.
Colour play
Using a nice, striking colour makes an icon stand out. The best move, naturally, is to use your company’s colour, since it ties into your branding. On top of that, it instantly forges a connection between app and company. When your app stands out among all the others, there’s a bigger chance a user will download it. And that’s exactly the goal! Scroll through your own apps; you’ll see that plenty of them use a relatively bright, eye-catching colour.
“Test your icon on different backgrounds”
Stand out everywhere
You don’t just want to stand out in the app store, but on the user’s device too, of course! It happens all the time: an app gets downloaded and then never actually used. That’s something you want to avoid. And you can, by making the app appealing on all sorts of backgrounds. By testing an icon against different backgrounds, you can find out whether it holds up in this department.
In the end it all comes down to this: you get just one shot at a first impression. So make sure it’s a good one! Do it right and you’ll stand out in the sea of apps for all the right reasons. Still finding it tricky to design a solid app icon? Then you’re always welcome to give us a call.
Written by
Laura Nijhuis