Icons8 is full of features that nobody knows about. While our team makes weekly releases of new features and improvements, many of our free and paid customers are unaware of that.

  • Some members of our community think we produce nothing more than a huge ZIP file with a bunch of flat and line icons inside.
  • Sometimes, people request some of these features.
  • Once, a paid customer asked to recommend a third party software for the feature we have.
Obviously, we should do a better job working on the discoverability of our features. Here’s the first step: the rating of our well-hidden features.

1. Grid View

Level of discoverability: true love

This feature is my favorite one. It allows seeing the same icon in all different styles (13 at the moment). When testing the usability, none of our participants used it. However, when we said this feature exists, they quickly found it and some were enjoying it.

2. Effects

Level of discoverability: a sock in a washer

Our analytics expert defines those who ever tried the effects as advanced. Only 6% of our community ever tried it.

Effects allow to add basic stuff to the icons without launching Sketch or Illustrator:

  • Adding a box or circle around the icon
  • Adding some spacing
  • Adding text (good for adding numbers and abbreviations to the icons like empty document)
  • My favorite: adding the overlays. In the example below, I’ve added the lock overlay to the bird icon.
  • Adding stroke, which was the hardest to do — a hard math.

3. Importing Your Icons

Level of discoverability: Atlantida

You can upload your SVG icons to our Web App, and work with them in the same way as you work with our icons. You can:
  • Generate PNG of any size
  • Recolor
  • Generate fonts
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4. Collections

Level of discoverability: a TV remote

You can select the icons in multiple collections. For example, you can create:
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A limitation: Icons are stored in your browser’s local storage. This means you can’t use the collection on another computer. Fixed: collections sync across the cloud now.

5. PNGs and Vectors of Any Size

Level of discoverability: an ideal guy

We don’t limit PNG icons to the predefined icon sizes. Instead, one can generate any icon size within 100×100 px. Given that, you shouldn’t care about the icon sizes yet. However, icons are pixel perfect for the standard sizes for a given icon: 25×25 px, 32×32 px, 50×50 px, 64×64 px, and 512×512 px.
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Paid users can generate any icon size, even 4000×4000 px.

6. Fonts

Level of discoverability: honest politician

Have you tried to generate the fonts with Icons8? Add a few icons to a collection and voila. Although it doesn’t have some of the advanced features of Icomoon (Icomoon is great!), many customers like and use it a lot; another confirmation was this week, when the feature was down for a while as we’ve switched to SSL. It resulted in 2 tickets and a tweet!
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Fonts do not work for our Color icons. Instead, you can generate SVG sets (which are even better than fonts) or use We Love SVG – our Google fonts for icons.

7. HTML and CSS Snippets

Level of discoverability: memory leak

No need to upload the files. Generate HTML code and insert it right into HTML, that’s it. There are three kinds of snippets we generate:
  • HTML with SVG source code
  • IMG tag with base64-encoded source
  • CSS injection with base64-encoded data

8. Desktop Apps

Level of discoverability: in fact, they’re pretty popular

You can download all our icons and store them offline with a native Mac or Windows app. You can drag the icons from the app to Sketch, Photoshop, Xcode, or VisualStudio. The auto-updates with new icons daily.

9. Reporting Bugs

Level of discoverability: visible, but rarely used

With thousands icons converted into several formats each, we discover and fix several icons a week. Recently, we’ve added the Disqus comments to the icon pages. Please feel free to submit your bug reports as comments; we check them and fix them. Thanks for your help!
Comments

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