2023, how was it? Icons8 recap of the year

Tons of new graphics, five whole new products, a lot of proudly made features, and some fun facts about us from the whole year’s experience.

It’s been a nice, challenging rollercoaster year. As a team, we’ve done a lot, and, of course, you’ve done even more with the humble help of our apps and assets. Let’s be a bit nostalgic and take a look at how it was in 2023.

Assets

The first thing that people see is the main page. So we decided to rethink the way it looks to highlight things that users need better and provide better UX. And, of course, worked on the pleasing visuals for it. In this article, you can learn more about the main page’s new UI.

This year also brought us tons of fresh graphics and 400k+ new users. Here’s what is new.

Icons

The web app has a new UI. Now, it is easy to search for the style you need. We added new filters and preview images.

We uploaded 50K+ new icons to our library and designed 19 new styles. Here are some of them:

The most downloaded style this year, and it is not a surprise, is iOS icons. Users got almost three million icons from this style this year! The most popular icon there is a calendar.

Illustrations

The illustrations library also got a new look. The main page now has all the styles organized whenever you need trendy, technological, or lettering illustrations. The “Styles” page is redesigned with new bright preview collages that give you an idea of what styles are there. In total, we introduced 67 new styles in 2023.

This year, we started to animate our 3D styles and also released one style of 3D illustrations right away with animations:

There are a lot of new 3D styles:

The newest style made is these Christmasy comic book-looking vectors:

Here are our personal picks of the newly designed styles for this year’s recap:

Apps

Throughout the year, we released five new products:

GoProd

Shoutout to the motion design team for this energetic race-running-themed promo video and fascinating animation for the landing page!

Face Swapper for iOS

Hey Photo

Our brand-new photo editor turns every image into a perfect fit for your designs! Forgot to smile? Want to change the direction of glance? Or maybe want to swap the whole face with another? Here you go, play with gender, emotion, and ethnicity, and make the person look at the bird.

Check out the whole detective story we made in the Hey Photo promo video on YouTube and appreciate the accurate story-telling on the landing page:

Human Generator

The slogan of this product is “Turn your God mode on” cause using a Human Generator feels a bit like it. From scratch, you can build a whole new photorealistic person. Other than typing your whole idea, you can just use various settings to choose the ethnicity, age, gender, clothes, hair, and poses, and use the prompt section only to add a little detail.

The release was a boom: on the first day, we passed over 250K generations! And it kept growing drastically within the whole year.

At the end of the year, the product received updates: now, you can type a negative prompt to ensure that something you don’t need will not appear in the result. You can choose from an even bigger library of poses and upload your own photo to use that pose for the generation. We also refreshed the UI and sorted settings more conveniently.

And, of course, pressing L for the design team for the landing page and these tiny animations on it:

This feels like the future already, huh? However, here comes Volograms, and VR was added on top of it. They literally turned our generated human into a hologram! Check it on Twitter.

Threedio

In case you missed it, here is a short but informative video about Threedio:

Plugins

Our Material icons Figma plugin trespassed one million users! Thank you all for the support and for using it throughout the year.

Steez plugin

AI-based little mommy’s helper in finding the right icon for your Figma project: Steez.

The real magic outside of Hogwarts: select your old icon while having this plugin open and get better results. Turn into modern and consistent icons literally everything: icon, image, text, hand-written sketch. In one second. For free.

Icons8 plugin for Lucid

Block schemes, tables, mood boards, and other management docs should never be boring. That’s why this year, we collaborated with Lucid and released a plugin to give their users even better graphics. Our Icons, illustrations, and photos are available now right away inside any Lucid doc. Check out how to use it here and connect it to your documents.

Media

We’ve been in touch with you through this blog, social media, and email letters for the whole year. Thank you all for your support with comments, likes, and shares. Thank you for posting the designs you made using our tools and assets.

Social media

If you also feel nostalgic, come and scroll down our feed on social media to see all the bright graphics we shared with you this year. And don’t forget to check our Behance, where we post our BTS:

And don’t miss the chance to appreciate colorful promo videos and tutorials on YouTube. Our personal pick is this new motion design video about our icons library.

Blog

We shared a lot of educational, inspirational, and fun stories in our articles this year. Check them all on our blog and take a look at these hand-picked ones:

Emails

Our newsletter, which we call Icons8 Magazine inside the team, had developed a lot this year: we kept tweaking the design of letters, tried different approaches on how to present the content, and played with visual formats. We hope you found our updates, new products and graphics, stories, and tips that we put in these letters useful and interesting. If you haven’t received them yet but want to, subscribe on the newsletter page.

Let’s keep staying in touch in the next year!

Designer’s 2023 recap

Our design team gathered together some bits of the 2023 to revise it:

In case you are fancy to share yours, you can find this free template and fill it in with your highlights in this Figma file. Have a nice 2024, guys!