Branding
Iconography
Iconography is the set of icons and illustrations belonging to a brand, drawn to shared rules: the same stroke weight, the same corner radius, the same level of detail. It is what makes a website, a deck and a manual look like one company.
What it means in practice
A set is not drawn all at once. You start with the twenty icons the company needs immediately and write the rule for drawing the rest: grid size, stroke weight, sharp or rounded corners, filled or outlined. The rule matters more than those twenty icons, because in a year the set will need its fortieth icon and someone else will be drawing it.
Why even a small company should care: when every department pulls icons from a different library, a client deck looks like a collage. One slide has a flat icon, the next a colourful three dimensional one, the third a thin outline. The client will not name it, but reads it as untidiness. A bespoke set of twenty icons costs hundreds of euros, not thousands.
How it happens: first you list everything that needs depicting and strip out duplicates. Then five icons are drawn as a sample to agree the style, and only once that is approved does the rest get drawn. You supply the list of services and processes that keep recurring in your materials. Delivery is SVG files plus a short page of rules in the brand manual.
When it is not worth it: if the company publishes two documents a year, bespoke iconography is a luxury and one well chosen paid library used consistently will do. The opposite trap is over illustration. When there is an icon beside every paragraph on a page, none of them work any more, because nothing is being emphasised.
We always start with five icons rather than twenty, and we test them shrunk to the size they will actually appear at. Plenty of icons look fine on a monitor and turn into a smudge at sixteen pixels. Try it today: scale your icon down to sixteen pixels and see whether you still recognise it.