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Comment by kurtvarner | Hacker News Reader

1) Put £500-800 of your budget aside

I think this is a gross underestimation of how much these designs would cost. Does anyone have any real data on the cost of iOS icon design?

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I've contacted several designers on that list, give or take exchange rates, you can expect to pay that.

Does that include the 57x57 icons though? As several people have pointed out, most of the icons you posted won't scale down, whereas Apple and Co may have some beautiful hi-res icons but also completely re-do them for smaller display.

Yes it did in my enquiries. I hired one of the guys and he produced the full set of icons, making changes to all the sizes to make sure they looked good on the phone.

Anyone willing to pay that much for an icon design either has deep pockets or a big commitment to good design. That is a lot of money for an icon.

I don't see that at all. Unless you are just building free throwaway apps in your spare time, it's in the realm of reason for any serious app.

People do make decisions based on icons, so a better icon can be good investment if you are trying to attract downloads.

In the Apple ecosystem, you need a commitment to good design. It's less strong than it used to be (for example read John Siracusa and early Gruber criticising Apple's design choices with in OSX or Pierre Igot taking every app he comes across to task). But it's always been a defining point of playing in the Apple world, ever since Steve Jobs mentioned his calligraphy classes.

I think it's a gross overestimation. There are plenty of good designers who will do work for a lot less than that. I had an entire iPad app design done for around $300 (icon, table background, custom table cells) and I recently got another design done for an app for $100 (icon, splash screen, custom tab bar backgrounds, custom nav bar backgrounds, custom table backgrounds).

I'd like to see what these "good designers" produced for that little.

I got all the graphics in this app, including the icon, for $100 and I was pretty happy with it:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/f1-mobile-2012-best-f1-app/id...

That looks like a 100$ icon if you ask me.

The price also included the splash screen, custom tab bar, table backgrounds, custom navbar. I could probably get better if I paid $800-1000 but I think that this is good enough.

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