Android iconography has changed under Google's material guidelines. It's a new dawn for icons on Android so obviously we need to build some tools for it!

Late last year Google revealed their new guidelines for Android Launcher icons, or ‘Product Icons’ as they are now referred to. It is a fantastically well documented effort to more strongly guide designers towards a unified visual language and it is probably the best thing to have ever happened to icons on Android. It is therefore way overdue that I launch a new template for Android Product Icons. You can go right ahead and download the PSD here, or read on for a bit more in-depth on the main differentiators of Product Icons on Android.

Constraints is a natural law when working with icons and for many years icons on Android has been an outlaw wasteland. This has in large part been because of a lack of constraints and a unifying set of enforceable guidelines. On iOS we’re all bound by the squircle and, with no transparency allowed, designers are funnelled into a more streamlined canvas. If you’ve ever designed an icon for any version of Android you’ll know that you’re allowed to do basically anything you want within those 512×512 pixels. With no restriction on the alpha channel every conceivable shape and effect is to be found throughout icons on Google Play. A few fledgling standard sizes and shapes within those vast transparent canvasses have been attempted but even Google themselves have changed their minds on more than one occasion. So freedom is good, right? Not when you’re looking at it from a user experience consistency stand point. Having shared similarities between icons create a much more pleasant, scannable and relatable OS. Google knows this and Google has taken great strides in cleaning up the micro cosmos that is 3rd party Android apps with their well documented material design guidelines. Icons are now also a part of that effort and with an updated template, I hope to make it easier for you to be part of that movement too.

Source: appicontemplate.com