Discussion: deprecation of brand icons

[awgv]

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.

[colebemis]

I totally agree with this. I wrote something similar in a recent tweet:

We have GitHub issues for all those icons but don't expect them anytime soon. Logos are really tough to make with Feather's constraints. Personally, I'd recommend using something like Simple Icons (https://simpleicons.org) for brand icons.

I don't know if it's necessary to deprecate all the current logo icons. But I think this is good justification for not adding more.

[locness3]

Well, maybe add the ones awaiting merge ? @colebemis

[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.

[jagirbahesh]

Icon Request: WordPress

[locness3]

Icon Request: WordPress

I think you missed the point.

[LizAinslie]

This is sad :C

Are there any good community forks I could check out that prioritize brand marks?

Feather Icons look extremely good on my site, as pictured below, but as also pictured below there are icons I've had to utilize that don't match well :/

[karsa-mistmere]

@LizAinslie: Please note that it in fact goes against Discord's brand guidelines to modify its logo, as already discussed in #1156.

Brand icons are deprecated mostly for this very reason, not just in Feather but the Lucide community fork as well.

[LizAinslie]

Wow! I hadn't expected to receive a reply this quickly. I presumed this thread was probably stale.

@LizAinslie: Please note that it in fact goes against Discord's brand guidelines to modify its logo, as already discussed in #1156.

Brand icons are deprecated mostly for this very reason, not just in Feather but the Lucide community fork as well.

@karsa-mistmere With all due respect that doesn't answer my question. I'm aware of Discord's brand guidelines and honestly I don't care that much; they haven't ever been too intent on even enforcing most parts of their ToS over the years so I doubt they'd care. I asked if anyone knew of an icon set that did modify the Discord logo similar to the style guide of Feather, not if it was allowed to modify it. I respect the decision to deprecate Brand Icons for this reason, but I have my own priorities. I'll probably just open up my vector software later and make one myself.

[karsa-mistmere]

@LizAinslie: There's already a Feather style Discord icon at #1156 (which I have linked for your convenience).

I don't believe you will find any stroke-only icon set that features a larger number of brand icons, for the very reasons Feather and Lucide have decided to deprecate them: not only do these violate most brand guidelines (which is probably fine on a personal homepage, but not really in even an open source project), they are oftentimes plain impossible to implement while also being restricted to the icon set's own guidelines.

If you really do need Feather style brand icons, you're best off fishing for them in icon request issues under https://github.com/feathericons/feather and https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide or designing them yourself.

[LizAinslie]

All done! Thanks 👍🏻

[jimmyff]

I understand that you need to draw the line somewhere so perhaps you could consider including brand icons that reach a certain level of global popularity? This could be something along the lines of 100 million monthly active users (MAU), this would limit the brands to a total of around 30 icons which would include popular requests such as whatsapp, tiktok, telegram etc -statista publish this information annually.

Many people and websites, blogs and themes use these icons for social media links their headers and footers and it will become obsolete for this purpose without adding popular platform brand icons.