- How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Mac Os
- How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Macbook
- How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Mac Pro
- How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Mac Free
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App Icon
Beautiful app icons are an important part of the user experience on all Apple platforms. A unique, memorable icon evokes your app and can help people recognize it at a glance on the desktop, in Finder, and in the Dock. Polished, expressive icons can also hint at an app’s personality and even its overall level of quality.
In macOS 11, app icons share a common set of visual attributes, including the rounded-rectangle shape, front-facing perspective, level position, and uniform drop shadow. Rooted in the macOS 11 design language, these attributes showcase the lifelike rendering style people expect in macOS while presenting a harmonious user experience. To download templates that specify the correct shape and drop shadow, see Apple Design Resources.
IMPORTANT When you update your app for macOS 11, use your new app icon design to replace the icon you designed for earlier versions. You can’t include two different app icons for one app, and the macOS 11 app icon style looks fine on a Mac running Catalina or earlier.
Design a beautiful icon that clearly represents your app. Combine an engaging design with an artistic interpretation of your app’s purpose that people can instantly understand.
Embrace simplicity. Find a concept or element that captures the essence of your app and express it in a simple, unique way, adding details only when doing so enhances meaning. Too many details can be hard to discern and can make the icon appear muddy, especially at smaller sizes.
Establish a single focus point. A single, centered point of interest captures the user’s attention and helps them recognize your app at a glance. Presenting multiple focus points can obscure the icon’s message.
To give people a familiar and consistent experience, prefer a design that works well across multiple platforms. If your app runs on other platforms, use a similar image for all app icons while rendering them in the style that’s appropriate for each platform. For example, in iOS and watchOS, the Mail app icon depicts the white envelope in a streamlined, graphical style; in macOS 11, the envelope includes depth and detail that communicate a realistic weight and texture.
macOS 11
Consider depicting a familiar tool to communicate what people use your app to do. To give context to your app’s purpose, you can use the icon background to portray the tool’s environment or the items it affects. For example, the TextEdit icon pairs a mechanical pencil with a sheet of lined paper to suggest a utilitarian writing experience. After you create a detailed, realistic image of a tool, it often works well to let it float just above the background and extend slightly past the icon boundaries. If you do this, make sure the tool remains visually unified with the background and doesn’t overwhelm the rounded-rectangle shape.
Make real objects look real. If you depict real objects in your app icon, make them look like they’re made of physical materials and have actual mass. Replicate the characteristics of substances like fabric, glass, paper, and metal to convey an object’s weight and feel. For example, the Xcode app icon features a hammer that looks like it has a steel head and polymer grip.
If text is essential for communicating your app’s purpose, consider creating a graphic abstraction of it. Actual text in an icon can be difficult to read and doesn’t support accessibility or localization. To give the impression of text without implying that people should zoom in to read it, you can create a graphic texture that suggests it.
How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Mac Os
To depict photos or parts of your app’s UI, create idealized images that emphasize the features you want people to notice. Photos are often full of details that obscure the main content when viewed at small sizes. If you want to use a photo in your icon, pick one with strongly contrasting values that make the main subject stand out. Remove unimportant details that make primary lines and shapes fuzzy or indistinct. If your app has a UI that people recognize, avoid simply replicating standard UI elements or using a screenshot in your icon. Instead, consider designing a graphic that echoes the UI and expresses the personality of your app.
Don’t use replicas of Apple hardware products. Apple products are copyrighted and can’t be reproduced in your icons or images. Avoid displaying replicas of devices, because hardware designs tend to change frequently and can make your icon look dated.
Use the drop shadow in the icon-design template. The template includes the system-defined drop shadow that helps your app icon coordinate with other macOS 11 icons.
Consider using interior shadows and highlights to add definition and realism. For example, the Mail app icon uses both shadows and highlights to give the envelope authenticity and to suggest that the flap is slightly open. In icons that include a tool that floats above a background — such as TextEdit or Xcode — interior shadows can strengthen the perception of depth and make the tool look real. Shadows and highlights should suggest a light source that faces the icon, positioned just above center and tilted slightly downward.
Avoid defining contours that suggest a shape other than a rounded rectangle. In rare cases, you might want to fine-tune the basic app icon shape, but doing so risks creating an icon that looks like it doesn’t belong in macOS 11. If you must alter the shape, prefer subtle adjustments that continue to express a rounded rectangle silhouette.
Consider adding a slight glow just inside the edges of your icon. If your app icon includes a dark reflective surface, like glass or metal, add an inner glow to make the icon stand out and prevent it from appearing to dissolve into dark backgrounds.
Keep primary content within the icon grid bounding box; keep all content within the outer bounding box. If an icon’s primary content extends beyond the icon grid bounding box, it tends to look out of place. If you overlay a tool on your icon, it works well to align the tool’s top edge with the outer bounding box and its bottom edge with the inner bounding box, as shown below.
In addition to the bounding boxes and suggested tool placement, the icon design template provides a grid to help you position items within an icon. You can also use the icon grid to ensure that centered inner elements like circles use a size that’s consistent with other icons in the system.
App Icon Attributes
All app icons should use the following specifications.
Attribute | Value |
---|---|
Format | PNG |
Color space | Display P3 (wide-gamut color), sRGB (color), or Gray Gamma 2.2 (grayscale) |
Layers | Flattened with transparency as appropriate |
Resolution | @1x and @2x (see Image Size and Resolution) |
Shape | Square with no rounded corners |
Don’t provide app icons in ICNS or JPEG format. The ICNS format doesn’t support features like wide color gamut or deliver the performance and efficiency you get when you use asset catalogs. JPEG doesn’t support transparency through alpha channels, and its compression can blur or distort an icon’s images. For best results, add deinterlaced PNG files to the app icon fields of your Xcode project’s asset catalog.
App Icon Sizes
Your app icon is displayed in many places, including in Finder, the Dock, Launchpad, and the App Store. To ensure that your app icon looks great everywhere people see it, provide it in the following sizes:
- 512x512 pt (512x512 px @1x, 1024x1024 px @2x)
- 256x256 pt (256x256 px @1x, 512x512 px @2x)
- 128x128 pt (128x128 px @1x, 256x256 px @2x)
- 32x32 pt (32x32 px @1x, 64x64 px @2x)
- 16x16 pt (16x16 px @1x, 32x32 px @2x)
Maintain visual consistency in all icon sizes. As icon size decreases, fine details become muddy and hard to distinguish. At the smallest sizes, it’s important to remove unnecessary features and exaggerate primary features to help the content remain clear. As you simplify icons that are visually smaller, don’t let them appear drastically different from their larger counterparts. Strive to make subtle variations that ensure the icon remains visually consistent when displayed in different environments. For example, if people drag your icon between displays with different resolutions, the icon’s appearance shouldn’t suddenly change.
How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Macbook
The 512x512 pt Safari app icon (on the left) uses a circle of tick marks to indicate degrees; the 16x16 pt version of the icon (on the right) doesn’t include this detail.
When creating a macOS or iOS app a very important part of the process is the actual coding of the application but once that is completed an almost equally important task arises: designing the graphics of your app. An app can have a great engine but without some gorgeous graphics nobody will want to buy it. Nowadays the graphical design of an app is equally important to the way it works. So for this you will need to hire a graphics designer which will cost a lot of money and a lot of time wasted on your part trying to explain to him the design you want for your app icon and graphics. But that is not the only way. In this article I will be talking about how this simple yet powerful macOS app can make your life a lot easier when it comes to generating icons and graphics for your iOS and macOS apps.
How do I create an icon on my Mac?
How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Mac Pro
Maybe the most important part of the graphical design of an app is its icon. This is the first thing that a potential customer sees and it must create a big impact. It must be pleasant on the eye but it also has to accurately depict the entire functionality of the app. For this you will need a powerful tool that lets you adjust even the smallest details of your icon. Icon Plus is such a tool. It basically allows you to select any image on hard drive and provides you with the tools you need to turn this image into the perfect icon.
Let’s say for example that you need to create an icon for a macOS app called Diet Tracker. You would need to select a background color and shape for your icon, maybe add a border and some shadow and you would also need to be able to position the central image of your icon with accuracy. Icon Plus lets you do all that and more as you can see in the video below:
But maybe you need an icon for an iOS app, which is a bit different from the icon of a macOS app. The icons of iOS apps are usually square, they use a color gradient as a background and have a flat design. Icon Plus can handle all these requirements with ease as you can see in the video below:
How do I create a logo on my Mac?
There are other graphic elements that you may want to create in addition to the app icon. For example you may need to create a product logo that you can display on your website or use it in ads on other websites. If that is the case, then you are in luck because Icon Plus can also help you create beautiful logos for your iOS or macOS apps. Check out the video below that shows how you can create a stunning logo design in less than two minutes:
How To Make High Quality Icons For Apps Mac Free
How to generate correctly resized iOS app icons
If you are an iOS developer then you know very well that Apple’s XCode requires you to provide the app icon in certain sizes. Manually resizing your app icon so that you can cover all the sizes that Apple requires can be a tedious and time consuming task. Luckily for you, Icon Plus does that automatically every time you export your icon, as you can see the videos above. But maybe you already have an icon and you just want to generate all the required sizes without modifying the design in any way. No problem. Icon Plus can also act as a simple icon resizer if that is what you need. Simply load your icon in Icon Plus and export it in all the sizes that XCode requires.
Powerful iOS and macOS app icon generator
So if you are looking for a reliable app that can help you generate your iOS or macOS app icons and graphics but you do not want to break the bank for this, then Icon Plus is the perfect solution for you. With a simple and intuitive user interface and a powerful graphics engine, Icon Plus will enable you to create both iOS and macOS icons with ease. You can also resize existing icons and create stunning logo designs in just a matter of seconds with this powerful graphics generator. So purchase Icon Plus today and for only $4.99 you will never need to hire a graphics designer again.