Discussion: deprecation of brand icons

You may find this information useful, and I also feel like this decision may alleviate some pressure from the community. Templarian/MaterialDesign—the community-driven extension for Google’s Material icons—came to a decision roughly a year ago to deprecate all brand icons. Here’s why (source):

[…] brand and logo icons are simply not Material. Additionally, we have had issues dealing with logos that don’t work well in a single color, don’t fit in a distinguishable way within a 24x24dp artboard, or are just very obscure logos to begin with. It is very easy to say that we do not feel that we have served this niche of icons well.

Needless to say, it’s the same pattern for Feather: there’s just no way to include all requested logos and maintain the same level of quality for brand icons drawn in the style of Feather; logos have their own style (well, duh), and perhaps, there is no need to mix the two for the sake of aesthetic consistency.

simple-icons/simple-icons repository already covers everything, uses SVG and the same 24x24 viewBox, so it could be a great replacement for people that need brand icons.

What do you think? Please respond with thumbs up/down to this post and comment if you have something else to add.

[mwskwong]

I personally disagree. You see, feather icons have their own style and aesthetics. If users absolutely want the original, then simple-icons is the way to go. Yet in certain cases, users are looking for icons that are visually recognizable but have the same aesthetics as the rest of the icons.

Take GitHub icon as an example, the one feather currently offers clearly has a different design from the original, but it looks more minimal and clearer when used together with other feather icons.

I believe we can do the same for other brand logos as well.

[PeterShaggyNoble]

Been meaning to post this for a while but we’d be more than happy to take on all your brand icon requests over at @simple-icons, as we’ve already done for Material Design Icons. Also being a member of the MDI team, I can say hat it has been a huge help being able to offload all such requests to a dedicated library as they can become a time-sink sourcing and designing them all, with diminishing returns the less popular a brand is. And then there’s the difficult choice of whether or not you compromise your own design guidelines or violate a brand’s guidelines when adding each one.

If a member of your team could take a run through all your issues & PRs, whether in progress, rejected or resolved, and slap the logo request label on them to identify them, we’ll begin working on fulfilling all requests we don’t yet have in our library.

Going forward, there a are few ways we could handle any future requests. Firstly, you could add a note to your issue template outlining that you will not be adding any more brand icons and directing people to request them from us instead (see the MDI template for reference). For any requests that do still come in despite that, you could then:

• just reiterate what the template says and ask them to request it from us instead - in practice I’ve noticed a very low uptake with this approach over at MDI,
• repost the request to our repo yourself, or,
• tag me or one of the other team members in a comment to bring it to our attention.