Brand iconography: designing a consistent icon style

Icons look like the smallest part of a brand identity. A set of pictograms for your services page, a few symbols in a presentation, some checkmarks in a table. Yet iconography is one of the places where inconsistency becomes visible fastest. The moment you mix icons from three different sources, your whole brand looks amateurish, no matter how sharp your logo and colours are. This article covers a component of your visual identity that is often overlooked: how to design a distinctive icon style that stays consistent everywhere, and how to capture that icon design system so it still holds up two years from now.

Why icons are more than decoration

An icon does three things at once. It speeds up reading, because your brain recognises a shape faster than a word. It structures information, by visually pulling lists, steps and categories apart. And it carries your brand, because the way an icon is drawn is just as much a style choice as your typeface or your colours.

That last point is often forgotten. Many companies treat icons as interchangeable commodities: find a symbol that resembles what you mean, paste it in, done. The result is a collection of pictograms that technically mean the right thing, but that visually belong nowhere together. A thick filled icon next to a thin line drawing next to a rounded colourful symbol. For the average visitor this is not a detail they name, but it is something they feel. It makes your brand less trustworthy without anyone being able to say why.

Iconography is therefore not a standalone chore, but an expression of your positioning, just like your imagery and your form language. If you want to understand how that strategic foundation steers your visual choices, first read our explanation of what brand strategy is. This article picks up where that leaves off: how to translate that strategy into a working icon system.

An icon system instead of loose icons

The core of consistent iconography is that you do not think in icons, but in a system. A system is a set of rules that you fix once and then apply to every new icon. That way the twentieth icon you add stays family with the first. Six choices form the backbone of such a system.

Style. Choose one main direction and stick to it. The three most common are line icons, filled icons and a duotone variant. Line icons look open, modern and light, and suit brands that want to radiate accessibility and clarity. Filled icons look sturdier and heavier, and work well where you want to show authority or robustness. Mixing is possible, but only with a reason: for example line for neutral items and filled for the active state in a menu. What you do not want is for the choice to be decided icon by icon by whichever designer happens to be at work.

Line weight. For line icons, the line weight is the most defining detail. An icon two pixels thick next to an icon one and a half pixels thick immediately stands out as messy. Fix a constant weight and keep it the same, regardless of the size the icon is drawn at.

Corners and roundings. Do you work with sharp or with rounded corners, and how strong is that rounding. This is a subtle knob that does a lot for personality. Soft roundings look friendly and approachable, sharp corners look technical and precise. Once chosen, you apply the same corner radius to everything.

Grid and size. Draw all your icons on the same grid, for example a square of twenty-four by twenty-four units, with a fixed margin at the edge. That way all icons keep the same optical weights and align neatly next to text. Without a shared grid, one icon will fill the available space while the other stays small, hanging in the middle.

Level of detail. Agree on how much detail an icon may contain. At small sizes fine detail disappears anyway, and too many lines make a symbol unreadable in a button or a tab. The rule of thumb: an icon must still be recognisable at sixteen pixels. If it is not, it is too complex.

Use of colour. Decide whether icons carry your brand colours or stay mostly neutral. Often a calm base works, with colour that you deploy sparingly for emphasis or for an active state. How you choose those colours and how you build a palette that holds up on every carrier, you can read in our step-by-step plan to pick brand colours.

Where iconography makes the difference

The importance of a distinctive icon style grows as your brand lives in more digital places. On a busy web page a deviating icon is still manageable. But in an app or a software product the logo and text largely fall away, and interface elements carry your brand. There, iconography suddenly becomes a lead player. The same goes for infographics, dashboards, presentations and manuals: everywhere you make complex information visual, icons do the heavy lifting.

It is precisely in those places that it is tempting to quickly download a free icon set. That works in the short term, but it costs you recognisability. A generic set that a thousand other companies also use makes your brand interchangeable. A distinctive style, however simple, does the opposite: it shows that everything you make comes from the same hand. That is exactly what a strong brand identity aims for, and it is one of the reasons an experienced branding agency does not treat iconography as a side issue but as a full-fledged part of the design system.

Capturing icons in your brand guidelines

A beautiful icon system that only lives in the head of your designer disappears the moment that person leaves or the moment a new supplier gets to work. That is why iconography belongs in your brand guidelines, alongside your logo, your colours and your typography. Capture three things.

First the rules: style, line weight, corners, grid and level of detail, with examples included. Second a library of the existing icons, in usable file formats, so that no one has to redraw an icon that already exists. Third a set of do’s and don’ts that shows what goes wrong: an icon from a foreign style next to it, a wrong line weight, an overly busy symbol. Those counter-examples prevent more mistakes than a page of abstract rules.

Iconography does not stand on its own. It is a layer within the larger whole of your visual identity, together with your typeface and the steps to develop a brand identity. Only when those layers are built according to the same logic does your brand feel like a whole instead of like loose parts that happen to stand next to each other.

Getting started with a consistent icon system

Are you unsure whether your current icons really form a system, or do you notice that a foreign style creeps in with every new carrier? Then it is time to treat your iconography as a full-fledged part of your brand identity. We help you design an icon system that fits your positioning and stays the same everywhere. Get in touch and together we look at how consistent your brand looks today.