Developing a software application is not easy at all; apart from the effective creation of the application you'll have to think of other things as well, like: making the software easy to work with, giving it a unique and appealing look, making it better than other software, etc. Apart from the qualities of the application, these little things are the ones that promote your software application among the end users. If the application is easy to use, has a friendly user interface, the look of the program is unique yet not too flashy a lot more people will want to have it and use it. On the other hand, we should be careful about the overall look of the entire application because if it looks too different or it is too striking, many of the new users will be reserved in trying it. The reticence might be coming from the fact that, due to the unconventional look, they will think that it is hard to work with this application. Also, the icons of the application must be eye-catching but not too flashy or different from the usual.
In order to have success with your software application it must be different from the others so to have some extra points in front of your competitors. Sometimes, it is not enough to have an application that is working very well because the competition might have the same type of application that has the same characteristics. You have to make your application stand out from the crowd and this can be done very easily. For example, you can make it different by customizing your icons. Using custom icons has many advantages compared with the free icons that can be easily found on the Internet. One of the advantages is the fact that your icons will be different from any other icons found in similar applications. Using free downloaded icons might be tricky because it is possible that somebody else used the same icons and this will not be good for the success of your application. End users might see it as a cheap solution and might refuse to give a fair chance to the software.
Another advantage for using custom icons is that the development process will be completely passed on to the designer of the icons, unless you decide to design them yourself. All you need to do is make the designer understand exactly what you need your icons to look like and how different they must be. Based on those indications the icon designer will produce some sketches that must be approved by you in order to proceed further with the final version of the icons. So, a lot of the work is on designer's account which must have a lot of creativity in order to produce something unique. Involving a designer in the process of creating the icons for your application will save you a lot of precious time and also will reassure you that no other application will have icons like yours, so it will not be possible for end users to confound your software with others.
While you're thinking of making custom icons for your application, take in consideration another idea: to make a custom set of icons. A set of icons contains all the possible icons that you will need for or in connection with an application. It does not matter that you will not need all of them from the beginning, because in time it is possible that you will need some extra icons and it is better to have them handy.
To make your application different from the others you can also use favicons, which is short for "favorite icons" also known as page icons. Basically, these types of icons are the ones that integrate into the other application like for example web-browsers. Often favicons represent the organization's or website's logo. They are used to build a more customized appearance for the respective application. The use of favicons has some advantages: your application will be easily recognized by the users in case they don't remember the application's name, it will promote the logo of the application, it will make your application look more professional, etc. Favicons are usually displayed into the web browsers, next to your website's page and you'll not see many applications or websites that have this facility.
Another thing you can do for making your application stand out of the competition is to have custom file type icons assigned to file types by default. Having these distinct file types is not difficult to achieve but they will make a big difference. The end user will have no problem in easily locating the files of your application among the other files. Besides that, having custom file type icons will be another way of promoting the logo of your application; the larger the number of icons and file type icons is, the larger will be the number of people to see and easily recognize your application.
Considering all the above we have to say that having a customized application is better that having one with a common look. Common looks can be easily confounded and the user will not see the difference between one application or the other unless they will definitely be different. For example, if he has two applications for the same purpose and the applications' icons or file type icons are almost alike, he will choose the first one that he sees. But if one of the applications has a custom, easily recognizable icon he will know as soon as he sees it that this is the application that he's looking for. These are only few tricks that software designers should take in consideration when making an application that has a commercial purpose.
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