The app icon and app store screenshots are the first things people notice when browsing the app store.

A well-designed icon grabs attention and makes your app stand out. 💡

But let’s be real. If you’re a busy developer, designing the app icon is probably the last thing on your mind, and your home screen might look like this:

Every Flutter developer's iOS home screen

Good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. 👇

How to Design a Flutter App Icon in Figma

While having design skills is helpful, you don’t need to be a pro to create a simple app icon.

In this video, I’ll show you how to design a custom app icon from scratch—even if you’re new to design.

Summary

To help you follow along, here’s the app icon template I shared in the video.

Here’s a quick recap of the steps:

  • Start with a 1000x1000px square for your icon background.
  • Design the foreground by combining shapes. Group them and center them.
  • For iOS icons, scale the foreground content to 75% of the total size.
  • For Android icons, scale the foreground content to 50% of the total size.
  • Android icons require separate foreground and background layers.
  • Export your icons with 1024w as the size selector.

Once you’re done, add the icons as assets to your Flutter project and generate the launcher icon using the flutter_launcher_icons package.

Extra tip: Importing FlatIcon icons into Figma

Want to save time? Search for icons on FlatIcon.

Once you find a suitable icon, export it as PNG or SVG and import it into Figma (remember to check the license!).

I recommend using SVG since it allows you to edit individual layers in Figma, though note that SVG export is a paid feature.

Wrap Up

As we’ve seen, creating a simple icon in Figma is fairly straightforward.

If you’d like to reuse my design, you can grab my template here.

Even better - you can use the Expo App Icon & Splash community template, which follows Apple’s and Android’s official design guidelines.

New course: Flutter in Production

Designing app icons is a small but important step in the app development process.

But when it comes to shipping and monitoring apps in production, there are many more things to consider:

  • Preparing for release: splash screens, flavors, environments, error reporting, analytics, force update, privacy, T&Cs
  • App Submissions: app store metadata & screenshots, compliance, testing vs distribution tracks, dealing with rejections
  • Release automation: CI workflows, environment variables, custom build steps, code signing, uploading to the stores
  • Post-release: error monitoring, bug fixes, addressing user feedback, adding new features, over-the-air updates

My latest course will help you get your app to the stores faster and with fewer headaches.

If you’re interested, you can learn more and enroll here. 👇