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There's two sides of that. First there's trends, which has been flat-shaded minimalism for a few years now[0], but before that we had a range of photorealistic or cartoonish icon styles. On the other hand, I do believe that most of these illustrations are way too detailed to properly function as icons. Styles and trends can change, but unless the author is working with a different meaning of the word "icon", they are always intended to be displayed at medium-small to tiny scales, staying instantly recognizable between a row of different icons. They are beautiful illustrations absolutely, but I'd not use them as icons. I would use illustrations like this maybe for the front cover of a manual or brochure, perhaps a nice wall-painting(/print) at my office's reception, that kind of thing. Now I haven't watched the videos (who here has?), so it's possible that some of these artists actually made less detailed and smaller versions of their designs, and it's just the largest one that's showing off in the display frame (it's actually not a very informative article on the whole, IMHO :) ). BTW I've seen the term "skeuomorph" thrown around this thread a few times, but it's not a synonym for "photorealistic". Icons on themselves don't generally have skeuomorphs in normal apps or OS's, however they are more common in videogames. And when they do it usually pertains not to what they're a picture of, but to their function as icons, e.g. a paper tag/label, road/wall/door sign, icon (in religious sense), charm/bead, pill design, etc. In which case I'd argue the skeumorph is still more part of the UI than the icon design itself. [0] counting "flat design" and "material design" icons as pretty much the same things here, when you compare them to the much more photo-realistic icons we had before. |