Icons are as old as the hills, this refers to the cavemen paintings and they have proven useful in representation, Even in modern times we use icons to represent places, sports, toilets etc.
Here we can see what sport is being played even if the design is simplistic, it is two shapes and a circle, and what really makes it is they’re all cohesive, they all vary in sport but the icon is different
Some other examples from the olympic, Germany 1936 and Mexico 1968
Here is the icons for the old macintosh, designed by susan kare. notice the lack of colour and simplicity. this is great especially for new users. we know the floppy disk as save now but back in the day it used to store date carrying thousands of KB, so thats why it was used to represent the save button
This means that icons can be recognised universally, if you go to the UK you’ll see that the toilets have a male, female and disabled icon for the toilets, now for the majority of the world they will use these icons or use icons similar to this.
Icons can also be known as pictograms, they’re a mental shortcut if anything. We use Icons all the time, a good example of this our app icons, we can tell what most apps are by the icon representing them, like the calendar or the maps. Something like photos or steam can be a little hard to know if you haven’t see the logo/icon before
As a user you may not even think of icons, as they are a mental shortcut. but as a designer a good icon is one that can easily tell you what it is. A good example of Icons being used in an interface is Uber.
We can see they use a mix of realistic and simplistic icons, we have a car simple which represents the trip feature, some food as an icon as well which would take you to uber eats. there are also simplistic icons like the search being a magnifying glass and the activity being a simplistic receipt
Again to further hone in my point, these Icons are used to show what features there are in the app without the need to describe it making it faster and easier for the user to book a taxi essentially. These Icons are good but if done wrong can hinder your interface by confusing the user or ruining the aesthetic of the User interface.
When creating a new app, with that will be the creation of icons for it, now being unique in your icons may hinder the user experience but if they are recognisable/based on something familiar i.e the calculator app has a calculator to represent it. It will make the Icon be more recognisable
There are 6 common styles used for the styling of icons