Making Icons Fresh
iA Writer and iA Presenter have new icons. We all get attached to what we know, so this double change can come as a shock. We’d like to share the thought and work we put into it, so you see the full picture.
Over the last 13 years, we went through a couple of icon iterations. For seven years now, iA Writer was our company logo with a cursor. We used the proprietary iA Sans with its exaggerated ink traps, the dot of the i which was lowered to fit the A, and the blue cursor. We all loved it and still do.
And then we built a second app. Choosing the icon was a puzzle that took far longer to solve than we expected. We wanted our app icons to look similar, but they still had to communicate the difference in purpose. We designed the new Presenter icon together with the next iA Writer logo. Here are some of the initial variations:
We settled for a similar approach using a P with a colored cursor. We had planned to change the iA to a W in iA Writer, too. Eventually. Maybe. Possibly.
