We once spent three weeks designing custom icons for a client's website. Beautiful, bespoke, perfectly aligned to the brand. Each icon was a tiny piece of craft.
The client's developer implemented them. Weeks later, we visited the live site. The icons were there, but wrong. The developer had replaced half of them with generic icons from a free library. "These ones loaded faster," he explained.
Nobody noticed. Not the client. Not the users. Not our carefully crafted icons screaming silently from the cutting room floor.
This is the icon problem: they're everywhere, essential to digital communication, and almost completely invisible when they work. Which means nobody values them until they fail.
A shopping cart icon doesn't need to be innovative. It needs to be recognizable instantly. A search icon doesn't need personality. It needs to mean search without a nanosecond of confusion.
Icons are functional first, aesthetic second. But designers (myself included) often flip that. We want icons that reflect brand personality, that feel unique, that show our skill. Meanwhile, users just want to find the damn search button.
Susan Kare designed the original Mac icons in 1984. They're still the visual language of computing. Not because they were innovative, but because they were universal. A trash can. A folder. A disk. Objects everyone recognized, digitized.
That's the discipline of icon design: subordinate ego to clarity. The icon's job is to disappear, leaving only meaning behind.
But here's where it gets tricky: sometimes you do need custom. When you're representing something new, something your industry invented, something without an established visual language. Then bespoke makes sense.
But for shopping carts, search bars, home buttons? Use the standard. Because the standard is standard because it works. And trying to reinvent it is how you end up with users clicking your beautifully crafted icon three times before giving up.