Thursday, March 28, 2024

Best icon packs [2016]

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Most manufacturers’ stock icons look neat and clean, but sometimes it’s a good practice to freshen things up. We here at Talk Android love icon packs, and we’re always bouncing between our favorites, whether it be the Moonshine icon pack, Empire, or some other new icon pack to hit the Play Store. If you haven’t been keeping up with our ongoing Best Icon Packs series, we’ve been highlighting our favorites on a monthly basis, sometimes even including some newly released options.

This month is no different, as designers from all over have brought a bunch of new and exciting icon packs to the Play Store, including a relaunch of the Empire icon pack. Whether you’re looking for something fresh with Material Design, something more vector-like or a whole new look, there’s an icon pack for you on this list.

Semith

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Semith is a relatively new icon pack, after having launched late last year. That said, there’s only around 380 icons available in the pack, but it’s no doubt one of the most unique options you’ll come across. The icons have a distinct look, featuring rounded corners on a square base. It keeps the flat-style that many are already used too with Google’s Material Design, but also really freshens things up.

Play Store Download Link

Toca UI

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Toca is another icon pack that takes on the same design principle as Semith: rounded icons with a square base. However, Toca offers a more distinct, colorful and vibrant style. With Toca, icons have actually changed quite a bit, so some of the icons can be a bit of a challenge figuring out what app it is. That’s a small downside, but overall, Toca offers a truly nice and fresh design. It’s simple, to the point, and there’s nothing too crazy happening. The wallpapers included in the pack also blend nicely.

Toca comes with over 2150 high resolution icons, meaning it’s likely that most of the apps you use are supported. If not, Toca takes advantage of icon masking technology to theme unsupported icons. New icons are added every two week, with the developer promising updates on a bi-weekly basis.

Play Store Download Link

Vento Squircle

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The Vento Squircle icon pack has some similarities to Toca with its square-like design, but offers much more intricate detail. The icon pack has some very detailed icons, but also takes advantage of shadows and smudging in an interesting way, truly establishing itself as a one-of-a-kind icon pack.

It features over 1700 icons, has a handful of nicely contrasting wallpapers and is even updated on a weekly basis. The icon pack also supports 22 launchers, so it should be fairly easy to apply this icon pack to all of the most popular launchers.

Play Store Download Link

Quada

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Quada is an icon pack that takes a lot of design hints from stock icons, but makes them its own by transforming them into a “uniform rounded square background shape.” Every icon is the same in that it’s a square with rounded off corners; however, each icon is unique, featuring its own color and a unique use of dimensional space and shadows.

This particular icon pack offers over 2500 beautiful icons and even comes with a icon request tool for those unsupported icons. Finally, it has a nice blend of cloud-based wallpapers that all match really well with the icons. I’ve personally been running Quada on my smartphone for the past few weeks now, and the few cents it costs is very much worth it.

Play Store Download Link

Rotox

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There are a lot of great icon packs out there, and we throw around words like “unique” and “beautiful” for them. While that’s all true for many icon packs we feature, Rotox is truly the cream of the crop when it comes to unique icon packs. Each icon is uniquely designed with a solid color. There’s then a ring around the icon pack in that same color, and the actual app logo is used as the contrasting color. To wrap it up in a pretty package, there’s also an interesting blend of shadows implemented.

Rotox boasts support for over 1800 icons, and like many other icon packs, it comes with an excellent selection of cloud-based wallpapers. Rotox supports all of the latest and greatest launchers out there, and while the icon pack boasts of weekly updates, that hasn’t happened since October 2015, as the developer has moved onto other unique projects.

Play Store Download Link

Empire 6.0

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Empire 6.0 is a fantastic icon pack, featuring a unique blend of retro colors and shadows. Right next to Rotox, this is some of the best iconography you can get for your smartphone or tablet. It has full support for all of the popular launchers, allowing you to easily enable the icon pack through the launcher’s settings.

The icon pack features over 2500 high definition and uniquely customized icons. This icon pack takes advantage of icon masking for all of those unthemed icons, and also has a whopping 150 matching wallpapers. Empire 6.0 takes things a step further by also offering a matching clock widget.

Play Store Download Link

Installation Process

Installing an icon pack is an easy task. In some cases, you can download an icon pack and it’ll work with the stock launcher. But, in most cases, you’ll need an alternative launcher like the Nova Launcher or Action Launcher.

If you’re using Action Launcher, once you have an icon pack downloaded, open the Action Launcher settings menu. Once there, head into Display > Icon Pack. Select “Icon Pack” and then you can choose from a list of icon packs you have downloaded on your Android device. The process is similar for Nova Launcher.

As you can see, it’s a quick and easy setup, but for a more detailed tutorial, you can click here.

Closing

And that wraps up our best icon packs for January! There are a lot of great options out there, and new ones are always appearing. That said, be sure to check back next month for another list of all the latest and best releases!

If there’s an icon pack you think we should’ve featured this month, be sure to let us know in the comments. We’ll try and include it on next month’s roundup!

Come comment on this article: Best icon packs [2016]

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