About Icons8

— Who are you?
After a little small talk, the ABC reporter became serious.
— With all the AI-generated stuff, how do I know you're not a generated person?
Maybe we should create a better about page, I thought.
Ivan Braun, founder of Icons8

In short

We enable great design by delivering high-quality, consistent materials that make your work look professional.

At Icons8, we don’t simply resell assets. Instead, we have teams of creatives who put in the work to draw, illustrate, and capture. Our design library represents the accumulation of eight years of refining our processes and talking with customers to get things right.

Sometimes we organize the meetups. It’s a great way to shot a striking teamwork photo

Below are some of our principles that make us different from any design marketplace or any software company.

In-house designers

We take quality control seriously. That's why we create the designs in-house with our team of icon designers.

We even had the full time photo team. Moreover one of our models works full time (she does make up and castings too).

The only media we don't produce internally is music.

Analytics oriented

We analyze searches and downloads of our icons and illustrations. We watch the searches that didn’t lead to downloads — these are the graphics we have to draw.

We also analyze the global searches for different graphics: what kind of illustrations did people search for on Google this year?

Finally, we perform user research: what problems are designers facing? How do they pick a style for their artwork?

Pay if you can

We believe that great design should not be limited to the elite.

I started my design career with a cracked Photoshop. I know how it is to be broke. Therefore, I wanted Icons8 to be free for those who can’t pay. Yes, with attribution, in a bitmap format, but that would work for any design I can imagine. Once you have money, pay a monthly subscription once.
Ivan

Our products offer extensive free options and are made available to open-source projects, educators, and students.

Design is technology

Although we feature our content, Icons8 is just as much about code. Nearly half of our team members are software engineers.

Some of the hardest technical challenges are:

Machine learning tools that are deployed across our products to edit images, generate people and illustrations.

We’ve won an award at Visual 1st Conference in San Francisco

Graphic software.It's some of the most challenging client software on earth. Most of the software shows some kind of a list of items. In contrast, design tools have unlimited freedom of action. That's a lot of math. And that's thousands of bugs, crashes, and freezes. Every design tool passed several years of debugging.
Backend. We have to tag, classify, and name several hundred of items each day. We serve it to multiple applications for web, mac, and windows. And we serve millions of requests for our APIs.
Compatibility. Developing our software, we go great lengths to support other software’s formats. Sometimes it’s hacking. So, Lunacy supports Figma, Sketch, and PDF format in our software. Mega Creators exports to PSD (a closed format, and everybody who worked with it hates it). We process the RAW files from our camera on the fly, automatically retouching, masking, and publishing within an hour after being shot. Finally, we export our designs to a bunch of hand off formats, from icon fonts to XAML.
Frontend. It's the last on the list just because it's the most visible part of our work. This page probably fits your screen nicely, but there's so much more, from Mega Creator to the Figma plugin.

Fully distributed before that was cool

While incorporated in the US, our team of ~150 works remotely and is spread worldwide: Argentina (headquarters), Serbia, Germany, Netherlands, and even China.

History

Before 2012, we were a design agency called VisualPharm (no connection to pharmacy, just a bad name). For 10 years, we have been creating icons for General Electric, the US Army, Disney, Europol, and 200 other companies. We used to release icon packs for free for self-promotion, although with a caveat: you should credit our work. Some people hated crediting us and offered money instead. This was how Icons8 began.

Naming

Tells the founder:

We've created an icon pack of 200 icons in Windows 8 style. So, I've registered a domain name reflecting just that: Icons for Windows 8.

I didn't put much thought in it, it all took 4 hours, to create the website from the idea to execution. However, I've met the deep interpretation, like 8 means infinity. Moreover, there's a well known design website inspired by my primitive etymology!
Ivan