About Icons8

How it all started

We started as a UX design agency called VisualPharm (no connection to pharma, just a bad name) back in 2002.

We thought we’d be designing interfaces, but the lion’s share of money came from icons. Back then, every time Windows released a new version, our clients needed updated icons to keep their software looking up-to-date.

For a decade, we created icons for big names like General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Qualcomm, VeriSign, and over 200 other companies. Those were good times, until Microsoft threw us a couple of curveballs:

• Windows 7 reused the same icons as Vista, so no updates were needed.
• Windows 8 introduced icons so simple that almost anyone could make.

To promote ourselves, we started giving away a pack of 200 free icons in exchange for a link back to our site. People loved them! Some even offered cash instead of links. Six months later, we stopped taking orders as an agency and focused entirely on selling icons.

Why Icons8? It only took me four hours to create a WordPress website hosting that free icon pack and register a domain name. Icons8 stood for “icons for Windows 8”. It was that simple.

I didn't put much thought into it. However, I later came across a deeper interpretation, like the number 8 means infinity. Huh! And now, there's another well-known design website inspired by my primitive etymology!

Ivan Braun, founder of Icons8

What we do

First of all, we make creative content. And we take quality control seriously. We have great in-house teams of icon designers, illustrators, animators, and 3D artists.

Creatives guided by clear processes can make fabulous things on a large scale. We take the best practices from IT and other industries and apply them to everything.

Not only our coders, but also icon designers, illustrators, and other teams use Scrum and run sprints in Jira. One never can draw a pack of 15K consistent icons or illustrations, a team with good processes can.

Ivan Braun, founder of Icons8

Icons

Since 2002, we meticulously make pixel-perfect icons that match each other within every style. So, Icons8 is the largest library of consistent icons in the world. Period.

Besides that, people request icons, and we draw them. Well, not all of them, but those that have been upvoted by other users.

Photos

Photoshoots are insanely costly. A few shots are everything that you get for a few days of preparation, one shooting day, and a few days of post-production. It makes top-class photography available for large brands, leaving smaller companies and freelancers behind.

So, if you can’t pay for shooting the photo you need… Then you will spend hours on stock photography websites searching for a photo. Or, even worse, you won’t find THAT photo and will end up cutting out a person from one photo, a chair from another, and combining them with the background from the third photo. Ugh!

That’s why we started Moose. 

We took pictures of people, objects, and backgrounds. And the key point was to do all the photos in the same studio, with the same equipment and lightning, so people, objects, and backgrounds match each other.

To cut studio costs, we adopted workflows from the film industry. We brought in producers, created storyboards, and wrote scripts. This approach helped us to capture the maximum number of photos in a single shooting day.

Ivan Braun, founder of Icons8

That way, we got thousands of images of the same quality that we could combine to get millions of photos as a result. Then we made Photo Creator, which later evolved into Mega Creator so you can get the picture you need, too.

Illustrations

The story behind Ouch! is pretty simple. In web and mobile design, people use illustrations for different cases like confirmation messages, 404 errors, etc. Needless to say, not all designers and developers are illustrators. So, here we go, helping creators who don’t draw overcome the lack of quality graphics.

First, we hired top Dribbble artists. Now it’s the in-house team of professional illustrators. 

A few years later, we realized that we could recompose all the illustrations to create even more. Like we did with photos, except that we needed to separate elements from drawings first. That was a hell of a job, but we did it! Now you can take any illustration, add graphic elements, and create your own picture in Mega Creator.

Music

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

We needed it ourselves and decided to create a collection of high-quality tracks for all kinds of video content: promo videos, video explainers, movies and animation, advertising, etc.

We didn't know much about music when we started it, so we hired musicians. It turned out to be a long way to get some music, like one track per month. Costs were above any reasonable numbers. So we went the other way and found the producer who reached out to great musicians and talked them into selling their compositions on our marketplace. Now we have a lot of music in different genres: classical, disco, hard rock & metal, orchestral, and others.

Tools

At first, the tech stack was primitive. We’ve set up a WordPress, created an ugly theme, and here we go. It was enough: people would pay and download a zip file, done.

After we’ve reached 1,000 icons, that wasn’t enough anymore. Searching for an icon became a tedious task of watching the rows and rows of icons. And, gosh, it was draining.

So we hired the first in-house devs to get a website where users could have easily found icons. And a native app because it's a time-saver. And recolor icons on the go before downloading them. And… 

Now, nearly half of our team are software engineers. Here is what they do:

• Website 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, etc. 
• Website 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. It can do everything that Figma and Sketch can. Now, we’re working on adding AI-powered features to it.
• Machine learning and AI. We integrate ML tools across our products to tag images and remove backgrounds, swap faces, and even compose pictures. We also built a few stand-alone AI-powered tools to cut out repetitive tasks: Smart Upscaler, Background Remover. And on top of it, we generated photos of people who do not exist, which is a whole new story.

How we work

• Making high-quality content. Unlike other marketplaces, we produce 90% of our content. It’s hard, slow, and risky. It requires recruiting, team building, and mentoring. But it pays off in the long run. 
• Being a distributed team. We dismissed the photo studio during the pandemic, and since then we all work from home. Unlimited recruiting area and a zero office are good for the team and the profit. 
• Giving back to the community. We believe that great design should not be limited to the elite. To prove that, our products offer extensive free options and available to open source projects, educators, and students.
• Being opportunists and experimenters. We release many major and sideline projects just because it’s fun: we experiment on top of what we have, pick the lowest hanging fruit and release it, if it picks up as a free product, monetize it.
• Being a human-to-human business. Our customers are different, from designers and developers to anesthesiologists and forklift drivers. We support, we do user research, we find solutions, we learn and teach. 

Summary

For those of you who scrolled to the end right away:

• We’re a large tiny remote company. 
• We’re happy to be romantic: we experiment a lot, try new stuff, share it, market it, and occasionally give up.
• We can afford it and, for the most part, stay focused enough to keep affording it.
• Our happiest moment is releasing something on ProductHunt. Follow us to share the moment.