One of the apps we made last year had over 200 icons. One of our awesome designers smashed out images of trucks and dolls and sunsets and a huge variety of images across multiple themes, all with consistent palette, tone, and effect. Of course we could have purchased stock images online, but our client had very particular needs so custom designs were called for in this case. Often though, you can save a lot of money if you don’t have to create all your icons and images yourself.
We discuss app design in the topic beautiful apps. Many of the graphical artefacts of an app design are icons or images found or created by the designer as part of this creation process, and in some cases these may be useful in other marketing material such as your marketing website and flyers.
Sticker Packs are becoming more common, especially now that both iOS and Android phones both allow these to be integrated into the standard keyboard, and are an interesting diversion for our designers from their regular duties. Apple celebrated the launch of sticker packs in iOS 10 with an entirely separate section of the app store devoted to these; people are making real money selling sticker packs, and this is a viable market if you can corner a niche opportunity and have a bold marketing strategy.
It takes a long time to draw icons and images, and we may sometimes offer an outsource service to clients to reduce the associated design costs. We have excellent design partners that are well practiced at these tasks and can perform the duties for a fraction of the cost of a similarly skilled employee in Australia. Please note however that we never outsource app or logo design so the opportunity for a lower rate on design is limited to some icons and image sets only.
Another source of icons and images are stock libraries. Many of these libraries require an annual subscription, and you may pay additional amounts for some images. Dapper Apps maintains a number of such subscriptions to gain access to a broad variety of materials. Suitable graphics may be made available to clients in app, website or other design assets, and may be reusable for general purposes depending on the license agreement. Costs associated with purchasing stock images will always be included as part of a design quote or specifically quoted as an expense in advance of any purchase being made.
Some icons, such as a company or app logo, are more involved and we have an entire topic called I just need an icon in which we discuss these. For more information about other forms of Digital Media, please refer to the topics app videos and infographics.