Badass Ideas

There was a time in my design career when it was a far fetched fantasy that my clients would be interested in my hair-brain idea to cross-pollinate their content over various social networks. Now, twitter and Facebook are all the rage and a website without a gaggle of social media icons littering it’s footer would just be unheard of. I hate conforming to trends, but sometimes trends bleed into client requirements.. and there lies the fine line many designers have to walk on a daily basis. We have to be as creative as humanly possible while meeting requirements, staying under budget and rocking deadlines.

Over time I have built a resource toolbox of both online and offline elements so I have a strong foundation of elements to build off of for creativity. Icon collections can be great, especially when you are on a tight timeline or budget, but it has contributed to one of my biggest pet peeves in web design. For the love the internet, if you design a site that has one look and feel don’t just slap some half-assed free set of glossy social media icons on it.

Over the past year I have tried to build a layered set of social media icons that I frequently use. Having the icons layered allows me to go in and customize them quickly to fit in with the overall site I am designing. Textures, lighting, shadows, hard edges, soft edges… all of these things are are easier to work into your icons when you have a layered set.

This is a base set of social media icons for designers who are looking to make modifications. They are not perfect. I invite you to improve upon them, add to them, customize them and use them at your leisure, just please… pass along the design karma and repost any improvements you make to them here.

If you use them in an interesting way, please link to it here, and if you use them at all, it would be really nice of you to just mention this blog post with a link back here.

Download the Zipped Layered PSD here- 1.0MB

The Badass Layered Social Media Icon Set by Samantha Warren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.