Business relevance is one of the Criteria for approving content on Iconfinder that our Content review team carefully follows.

The icons and illustrations that we approve to be included in the Iconfinder marketplace need to be relevant to customers. Thus, creating artwork that meets a real demand increases the likelihood that it will get good sales. 

Before creating a pack of icons or illustrations, we recommend that you ask yourself this very important question: Where could these be used? 

For icons, it is recommended that the pack as a whole is relevant for customers. Customers buy packs that contain icons that are complementary to each other, so they can all be used together on the same website, app, presentation etc. They are looking for consistent icons that fit well together. 

For illustrations, it is more common that customers buy less of them. However, having consistent packs of illustrations that cover different scenarios and use cases also increases the likelihood of making good sales. This is because customers will want to create a consistent design across their website, product, presentation, etc. Check out this article about how to build a well-performing illustration shop to learn more.

For example, a pack of UI elements - containing icons for click, search, print etc. - will sell very well. 

On the contrary, a pack that contains many variations of the same icon will sell poorly, as no customer would need the whole pack. Most likely, customers would buy one icon from that pack at most.

In the example below, a UI pack with almost identical icons is not interesting from a business perspective. 

As another example, the pack below is beautifully drawn, but a pack containing only jellyfish icons will most likely not sell well. Instead, the pack could be about underwater life and contain other animals, plants etc.

Below, the pack containing different dog breeds has little commercial value because there are too few use cases for all the dog breeds together. Additionally, the pack is also missing aesthetic appeal. 

Some categories and themes on Iconfinder already have a lot of icons, but don't sell that well. Two examples are 'Country flags' and 'Weather packs'. We have thousands and thousands of country flags and weather icons in every possible configuration. The problem is, every other designer had this same thought and now we have way too many icons that are almost all the same. The result is that very few designers make any sales when this happens. The irony is that this often happens in categories where there are not a lot of sales to begin with.

The point is we try to tailor our marketplace to serve what customers want and need. The best policy when choosing icon packs to create is to find a category that has medium to high demand, but not much supply. To get to know more about demand for icons on Iconfinder, we strongly recommend you to check out our Icon designer reports.

Having large illustration families (families are a group of packs in the same style) is key for performing well with your products. Think of all the possible use cases and topics for illustrations and give customers a large family to choose from.

These 2 illustration families are a great example of this point:

Check all of our Criteria for approving icons and illustrations.