We have already told you the stories of our collections Innovicons and Liconica. 

And now it’s time to reveal the history of Highlight Icons, one of our popular families with a large number of icons: at the moment t includes almost 1k images, and this is not the limit, it’s still growing!

Its history starts in spring’2016, at the very beginning of the studio's work. Our head Ilya had prepared the sketches and developed the themes, then they were drawn by the designers. At that time Ilya concerned himself with calligraphy, so the sketches were made on paper with the grid for the pen size, 6mm.

This way the team had made 70 sets of icons by the early fall (and in November'16 the physical office was opened, by the way).

At the beginning, we decided to focus on non-business themes to diversify our portfolio. For example, all kinds of animals (the collection can be literally used as the encyclopedia) and fairy tale characters.

The time was passing by, and the collection (which we called simply “Line Icons” that time) was living its life on stocks, and we couldn’t help thinking it needed rebranding. We liked the whole look of the icons, their unique themes, and colors, but it was obvious that we should have taken a fresh look at the family.

So probably at the end of 2019-early 2020, we started a huge renovation. The whole family was redrawn with our new approach and experience which we had obtained within these years. You can see the before/after effect: upper icons are from the “Line Icons” collection and lower are new Highlight Icons. You can notice that the changes are crucial, but the main idea remains the same.

There are icons from the sets of astrological signs, retro technologies, and dog breeds. As for the psychological one, it needs to be mentioned that in 2016 it wasn’t such a trend as it is now. At that time Ilya understood that the stocks lacked the images on this theme, so he was searching for the information on specialized forums and websites to go into the question and visualize it. Last year we developed new sets with not only problems but the psychological methods and positive effects of therapy. So now we have a separate collection dedicated to Mental Health.

Dogs are also gathered in one collection – it has 24 popular breeds. And we couldn’t help but drawing cats too!

After the huge renovation when all the icons were redrawn, we decided to enlarge the number of themes the family addresses. As we have mentioned, at first this collection wasn’t supposed to touch upon business topics, but later we understood that we should have included business icons too. Thus, we added office, management & marketing essential icons.

But we couldn’t forget about animals as well: we drew even more of them. We thought that it was unfair to include dogs in the family and leave cats behind. And we created 24 icons of cat breeds.

One more direction has been developed: we started to think of History and its periods and soon elaborated unusual sets such as “Prehistoric Times”, “Renaissance”, “Ancient Civilizations” (Greece, Egypt, China, Rome), “Middle Ages” and “Modern History”.

As the collection was in progress even in 2020, we made icons dedicated to Coronavirus protective measures and symptoms so that they could be used in infographics or visual aids.

Now the Highlight Icons collection alongside Innovicons is the family we are proud of, and we continue updating and making it better.