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 help designers by creating

Quality graphics
Graphic design apps
AI tools

Unlike other graphic design marketplaces, we’re are artists, not resellers. Our design library is the result of 12 years of hard work, refining our processes, and talking with customers to get things right.

Before we turned remote. We used to wear pants to work.

Here are the things that make us different from the rest.

In-house designers

We have our own teams of icon designers, illustrators, animators, and 3D artists who produce hundreds of visuals every week.

We adopt the best practices from IT and apply them to everything. We use Scrum and run sprints in Jira. One artist can never draw a pack of 15K icons or 2K illustrations, a team with solid processes can.

And yes, Icons8 is the largest library of consistent icons in the world. Period.

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

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Creativity based on analytics

We don’t guess what designers need — we analyze and listen:

We study searches and downloads of our icons and illustrations to spot trends and identify gaps. No download after a search? That’s our cue to create the missing graphic.
We keep an eye on global trends and use SEO tools to discover what people are searching for.
We conduct structured interviews with designers: What problems are they facing? How do they choose a style for their project?

Pay when you can

We believe that everyone deserves access to great design, no matter their budget.

I started my design career making banner ads for $100 a month. I used a cracked Photoshop. Back then, a licensed copy cost half my annual salary. So I know what it’s like to be broke. That’s why I wanted Icons8 to be free for those who can’t pay yet. Yes, with attribution and in a bitmap format, but it’s enough to get the job done. Once you’re in a better spot, you can support us with a subscription.
Ivan

Our products come with extensive free options and are always available at no cost for open-source projects.

Design is technology

Icons8 is not only about cute pics. To help people quickly find the exact visuals they need, we had to build a whole platform. Nearly half of our team are software engineers.

Here is what they do:

Frontend. It's the most visible part of our work. This page probably fits your screen nicely, but there's so much more: filters, collections, online editor, Figma and Photoshop plugins, etc.
Backend. Every day, we upload, tag, classify, and name hundreds of items. The backend handles millions of requests from the website, desktop apps, and API users.
Desktop software. To bring our graphics closer to users, we made Pichon for macOS and Windows. We created Lunacy, a powerful graphic design tool with our graphics inside.
AI. We started with internal AI tools that saved us tons of time to tag images, remove backgrounds, and even compose pictures. Then we made Background Remover and Smart Upscaler. We generated photos of people that don’t exist, launched Human Generator, Illustration Generator, and GenYOU. And there are even more exciting products on the way.

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

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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 the Windows 8 style. So, I registered a domain name reflecting this: Icons for Windows 8.

I didn't put much thought into 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. Huh! And now, there's another well-known design website inspired by my primitive etymology!
Ivan