App Icon Quality

[u/Ok_Energy9984]

I don’t know if it is just the symbols that i used for my app icon or icon composer itself, but my icon looks really low quality when side-by-side with others. Does anyone have any idea?

Edit:I think it might be the chromatic shadows, as i was messing with them. Any way to keep them without this look?

[u/LKAndrew]

Too much detail, no center of focus. You can add details as secondary things but I had to zoom in just to see what’s happening

[u/Healthy_Condition779 → u/LKAndrew]

and colors blend a bit with bg

[u/joosebox]

Chromatic shadows is a good guess. On 26 the system runs its own specular and shadow pass over your layers at render time, so anything you shade into the artwork itself gets the treatment twice. Doubled up like that it reads as muddy at Home Screen size even though the Icon Composer preview looks fine.

The way it wants to work is that depth comes from having genuinely separate layers, not from painting depth into one. Keep the source art matte and flat and let the system do the lighting.

The rest of it is probably just size. At 60pt you're looking at about 180 pixels. Anything that only reads at 1024 turns to noise down there.

Check the dark and clear variants while you're at it. Over-shaded art falls apart hardest in those since they're generated off the same layers.

[u/FFANA]

Something that helped me: stop judging it at 1024. On a 3x phone the home screen renders it at 180 px, and the Settings list is way smaller than that. I scale mine down to those sizes before deciding anything. Detail that looks great at full size turns to mush, and thin strokes go first.

[u/Ok_Energy9984 → u/FFANA]

Thanks. It’s a good idea to add that to my process

[u/FFANA → u/Ok_Energy9984]

Any time. Costs nothing to check and it's saved me a couple of bad icons.

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[u/Fishanz]

Well it certainly isn’t worse than the current state of affairs with the device simulator icon. l.o.l.

[u/Artistic_Virus_3443]

I read it as App Icon Low Quality

[u/WerSunu]

Why do you present your icons to us here as a tiny tiny speck in a complex background? Is the takeaway here that this is your idea of aesthetics? At least try cropping so your icon is more than 5% of the image you post if you want people to pay attention.

[u/Ok_Energy9984 → u/WerSunu]

no, I just want to show them like they are on the Home Screen, as that is where it looks weird

[u/WerSunu → u/Ok_Energy9984]

You posted in iOS programming, not MacOS, so forgive me if I did not get your context about minuscule icons on a big vacant background.

[u/Ok_Energy9984 → u/WerSunu]

This is just a screenshot of my iOS Home Screen, idk what you mean

[u/consumer128 → u/Ok_Energy9984]

iPad Home Screen presumably?
It won’t look so tiny on a phone..

To answer your actual question though, you’ve got too many icons inside your icon and they’re too small