Besides creating own icon collections, I’m also offering custom icon design. And I’m one of the few designers doing custom icons at Iconfinder.

The custom icon project for Synergis Software was complex, as the client asked for a coherent set of 150+ icons to redesign their window-based application (an engineering document management product). The requested style of the icons was black outlines with a little color. A perfect case to use the foundation of the Picons Thin collection and extend it with color.

So the first steps, after studying the brief, were to define the grid (I’ve choose 24px), corner rounds, stroke weights and color palette, as the basic elements that will define the visual language of the complete icon set.

Larger icon collections require not only to follow a grid but also strict style guidelines that will define the character of a collection. When this fundament is built, creating a large icon set is fun as those design elements get repeated throughout the set to tie all icons together as a whole.

Our friends at Iconfinder also wrote a blog post about this custom icon project.