Icons are a fundamental part of web and app design. With them, you can create a friendly and professional design revolving around a single theme that provides personality and the experience of harmony through aesthetics.
Icons can visually break long content. By adding some in-between paragraphs, you make the content less boring, easier to read, and more entertaining. With short and minimal content, on the other hand, you can reduce the emptiness with icons and give your content more substance. Using icons this way helps users retain their attention and absorb information more efficiently. Moreso, icons can even lure users into reading the rest of your content.
Icons, like emojis, and in ancient history, hieroglyphs, provide a way for effective communication without words. This is paramount for this day and age with our short attention spans.
While this sounds simple enough, there are some difficulties in finding suitable icons. For developers and designers, the challenges may manifest themselves in the form of not being able to change colors in bulk, needing to jump from one software to another to make minor edits, the inability to use code to implement changes, and potential blurriness through pixelation. On top of that, icon style should be uniform to avoid distracting users or draw attention away from the content. While it may be nice to have several libraries, from which to download icons, it is imperative to have them in the same style.
We found that Streamline addresses all of these issues and meets all their requirements.
What Is Streamline?
Streamline is the world’s most extensive icon library with over 30,000 icons. More accurately, Streamline has over 10,500 icons with three different weights, grouped into 53 categories and 720 subcategories. These weights are more than just thicker or thinner strokes; each weight is an entirely new icon. Since icons are an integral part of your day-to-day design process, it’s crucial to have a vast library at your disposal and one that is easy to customize.
Not only is the library the largest, but it’s also very customizable and is compatible with major design software like Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, and more. It was created with the needs and desires of both designers and developers in mind. It has evolved to such a degree that many companies use it to meet their requirements.
Here’s Why We Love It
Icons should be relevant to your content and simple in design. A very basic icon can add charm and personality to your website. Streamline has the most comprehensive icon library, so your aesthetic design options are unlimited.
Ease of Use
With Streamline Icons, you can find the right icon in a mere second. This is vital as it is timesaving and makes your workflow much smoother. It does not matter what software or file format you choose to use it works flawlessly, regardless.
Streamline has launched its own web app, which lets you browse, search, edit, and download Streamline icons from your browser. This is especially good for people who have no access to the macOS exclusive Iconjar — a useful tool for handling icons.
Customization
Streamline icons are highly customizable, and even for the developers and coders amongst you, working and editing these icons will be easy as they are all in the SVG file format.
In addition, as all icons are symbols, updating and editing them is straightforward and can be done simultaneously across all designs. Streamline also offers vector-based icons that can be resized to any size and still remain perfect, which is invaluable when working on very small or huge projects.
Unified Style
Icons must have the same visual style, and Streamline delivers. All their icons have a similar style, and they are further divided into categories to make the process more effective.
Multipurpose
Icons are used for design on various platforms, from small to large. Streamline’s library can be used for:
- Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, since the icon style was inspired by the latest iOS guidelines.
- Websites, with eye-catching icons, create visual breaks, and compliment the content.
- Infographics, where images and specifically, icons, are required to tell a story, and as Streamline offers icons that have the same style, you should be able to create a clear, aesthetically sound narrative.
- Smartwatch design, where the surface is so small that it requires resizable, vector-shaped icons for clarity.
- Streamline works just as well on the other end of size requirements. People who need large icons, for CMYK printing, can just as easily use vector icons to meet their scale requirements.
Compatibility and Organization
As a designer, you are probably using one of the top design software out there like:
- Iconjar, which is a macOS exclusive software. For those who use it, you can simply download the Iconjar file format, open it and have all the icons organized in a list with every section and subsection. From here, you can very easily search and use the drag-and-drop option to interact with other design software.
- You can download the Adobe Illustrator .ai file format and customize the icons as much as you want. The same goes for Adobe XD.
- Sketch is another tool that we love and have written about. Each and every category in Streamline comes with a Sketch file format, and when you open it, you will find that it is appropriately named and organized in the software window. Use color symbols and masks when you use Sketch.
- Streamline also offers the ability to download the Figma file format and use it.
The Bottom Line
You need icons for your design. Whether you are designing websites or apps — be it for small displays or large, creating visually informative content like infographics, printing posters, or banners, you will need icons.
Icons complement and enhance your content. They can retain your reader’s attention by offering breaks from long paragraphs, or on the contrary, add substance to minimalistic content. They can entice users to see what else you have on your website and they, in general, create an inviting, friendly, and professional impression.
However, not all icons are the same. Mismatched icons can confuse, pixelated icons can cause aversion and bad icon formats can make working with them extremely difficult, both for developers and designers.
Icons need to be vector-based, and they need to have a single style that creates unity in the design. They need to work well with the most popular design software, and they need to be easily editable and customizable.
Streamline’s icon library offers just that. With more than 30,000 icons to choose from and all designed in a similar style, Streamline offers the most wide-ranging library of complimenting icons. Furthermore, since all its icons are symbols in the SVG format, it becomes effortless to modify and update them, individually and in bulk, both for designers and developers. This saves time and eliminates frustration.
Additionally, the fact that Streamline is not only compatible with the majority of the most popular design software but is also tailor-made to be as organized as possible when used with them is a major advantage. We, at Elementor, love this tool.
Should you be interested, Webalys, the company behind Streamline offers additional products like 50 vector illustrations in multicolor, duotone and monotone, 780 free emojis, and more.
Streamline’s icons come in different packages:
- You can try it for free, with 100 different icons with three different weights.
- The essential package includes 4000 icons organized into 14 categories, the price for one weight is $97, for three weights, is $194.
- The ultimate package includes 10,500 icons, organized into 53 categories, the price for one weight is $137, for three weights is $274.
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