Iconography for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about iconography assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to keep

Icons without labels are guessed wrong more often than teams assume. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

The practical version

Decorative icons should be hidden from screen readers. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about iconography before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Icons without labels are guessed wrong more often than teams assume — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.