What is an app icon? - Affinity Designer Tutorial

- [Instructor] Making a good looking and memorable app icon is important to the success of your app. It is the first thing that a user will see and continue to see every time they utilize your app. Let's face it. When you're searching for a new app in the Apple Store or the Google Play Store you're going to ignore the app icons that look ugly or just don't look professional. What is an app icon? What job does it serve? An app icon is the visual identity of your product. If you're creating a game you may want to use the character in your game as part of your app icon or something that's relevant within the game, and it has to feel like the game. Two, it needs to be attractive. If your app icon is sloppy looking and you have jagged edges in some of your imagery it probably is not going to look professional, and that may turn people off. It needs to stand out. When you're looking at your app icon laid out with some of the other icons that'll be in the Google Play Store and the Apple Store what you'll notice is there are a lot of app icons that may look similar and you really want yours to stand out. So what can you do to create an icon that has some sort of factor within the design to make it really stand out? Your app icon needs to give the user a sense of what the app is all about. When you look at an app and you're looking for an app specifically, for instance, a messenger app, you want to have something within the design of that app that looks like it's a messenger app. So you'll see a lot of apps that'll have the little thought bubbles and that's a common motif used when talking about chat apps. But you need to do something else to that to make it really stand out, but you also want to make sure that it communicates that that's the type of app that they're looking for. App icons are not logos. The app icons that you create, they have a specific size. So it needs to fit within a square. Those squares usually have rounded corners. So that's very specific to app icons, but you won't usually have that in a logo. Logo, you may use any type of layout for that. Also, an app icon being raster based is a necessary need within the specifications. If you look at icons and logos in comparison a lot of logos need to be in vector format, and that's because they're being printed and enlarged and scaled down in different ways. But within the app specifications your apps are going to end up being raster based. You can create them using vectors, but the end output will always be raster. App icons are customized to look good within a square canvas at a specific size and in a specific context. So like I said, it's going to be within the rounded corners most of the time, at least for the iPhone versions of your app icon. For the Android versions, it's not necessarily going to always be within those rounded corners. They give you a little bit more liberty, but you still have to work within those specific dimensions. And app icons have an objective that differ from logos. An app icon is going to be shown in various sizes within a specific specification. So within the Google Store you're going to see it, it's also going to be used on the home screen. And then there are a few other areas where it may be enlarged or scaled down to be used in different areas. Now that you know what an app icon is and the function it fills let's take a look at a few key factors of making a recognizable and memorable app icon.