What icons do for your brand’s identity

While visual assets are critical to communicating your B2B brand’s identity, certain types of imagery only stand out when you do them wrong. Icons fit right in that category.

Whether they’re used in a website, app, or brand collateral, icons are integral to the overall user experience (UX). This is best explained with the help of cognitive load theory, a psychological concept that refers to the mental resources a user requires to successfully interact with a site.

Good icons help reduce the amount of mental processing you need to absorb information, navigate to the right section or page, and complete your goals as a user. This can also be true in a piece of collateral like a brochure, business card, or presentation, where the eye can be strategically drawn to important pieces of information.

“Icons are useful anywhere that requires visual wayfinding,” says Jeanette Thompson, Marketing and Brand Strategist at Motum B2B. “If your business exists within a larger brand framework, such as a collection of sub-brands under the umbrella of one ‘master’ brand, you also need to consider how icons are connected within that hierarchy.”

Simply put, icons are small elements that do a lot of behind-the-scenes work for your brand. Poorly implemented icons can slow down a user’s journey through your site and leave a bad impression of your brand, while good icon use makes everything feel seamless.

What icons do in your brain

Confusion and cognitive load

Icons aren’t just about adding pizzazz to a page. If we stick with cognitive load theory for a moment, bad icons can distract a user from important information, add unnecessary complexity to site navigation, and make the user’s goals more difficult to achieve.

Let’s say you have an ecommerce website, and you decide to replace the usual shopping cart icon with one that’s shaped like a dollar bill. It still links to the shopping cart, but the majority of users expect to see an icon shaped like a cart, bag, or basket. A dollar bill icon might confuse them and add to the cognitive load, resulting in fewer sales because some users won’t understand how to check out.

“You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel,” Thompson explains, adding that examples like magnifying glasses for search parts and envelopes for email are already well-established. “If there are universally understood icons, they should be used for universally understood actions.”

Every icon should make sense in its context, whether it’s the topic at hand or an action you want users to take. That could be a fuel gauge icon next to a paragraph about energy efficiency, a thermometer next to an image of a product build to resist high temperatures, or a target next to a tool that provides data analytics, to name a few examples.

Lack of cohesion

The human brain likes to group similar-looking things together. That’s a simple way of summing up the Gestalt theory of art, which we won’t get into here, but the idea is that when icons look too different from one another, the brain has trouble connecting them as part of the same group. That's a problem for brand cohesion.

“It’s much smoother to have consistency from a UX standpoint,” says Thompson. “You can see how much clearer and more consistent it looks when you’re using the same style of icons in a unified application.”

A disconnect can happen when, for example, you have multiple icons that use different colours, line weights, corner rounding, illustration styles (such as outline-style, gradient, or solid fill), or levels of detail, which can impact cognitive load down the line.

What icons do for your brand

In the past, we’ve talked about how brand guidelines should create a cohesive, consistent look that tells your brand’s story. Icons are an important part of that narrative.

It may be tempting to find icons from stock libraries or have an AI bot generate them, but these options make it more difficult to apply your brand treatment.

“Paying attention to the details polishes up your brand,” Thompson explains. “If you’re just sourcing icons from anywhere, your options are limited, and you don’t have the ability to be as consistent. Creating your own suite of icons can be really helpful in keeping everything cohesive and unified.”

How brand icons are developed

Considering that they need to stay connected to your other brand visuals, icons are generally developed alongside other components of your brand guidelines, such as your logo, colour palette, and fonts.

“Icons are a part of defining your brand identity,” Thompson says. “Whether you’re first establishing your brand identity or revisiting it, the treatment style of your icons should be defined in your brand guidelines. Then, it’s about customizing your suite of icons to match what you need.”

Guidelines might demonstrate how the icons can be edited (for example, can they be recoloured, and which colours are allowed?), where they can be used (are they just for your site’s navigation menu, or can they go in a brochure?), and how they can be used (can you stretch it to fit different dimensions?). It’s all about keeping that visual cohesion as strong as possible.

If you’re thinking, “Woah, I’ve never thought about outlines, gradients, or cognitive load in my life. What do I do with all this?” Don’t worry. This is where experienced designers and brand strategists can help.

“Brand strategists look at the system as a whole,” says Thompson. “That’s why you work with an experienced agency that understands all the moving parts in an interconnected brand framework.”