Have you tried getting noticed on the Apple app store lately?

There are over 700,000 active apps in the apple app store. Out of those apps, 126,628 are games.  Last month alone, 1,257 games appeared in the app store, with an average of 97 games released per day.

The reality of the app store is that if you build it, they won’t always come.  

The app icon is a potential player’s initial encounter with your game in the app store.  Needless to say, your icon needs to be appealing (i.e. it has to appeal to the type of person you want playing your game).

We recently created the app icon for Super Nut Jump, which looks like this:

Like the Rocketeer!

I can tell you that we didn’t arrive at this icon right away.  It took many iterations to get us to this icon, and our initial icon actually looked like this:

The original app icon

We discovered a couple best practices through trial-and-error and we thought we’d share those with you today.  Hopefully these will be helpful to anyone looking to enter the crowded app store, and also save you some time!

1. Show, Don’t Tell

Don’t use words in your app icon.  The image and the title are separate streams… so don’t cross the streams! Besides, your game’s title is always displayed beneath the icon anyway, so having the title in your image is redundant.

2. Keep It Simple, Keep It Direct

57 x 57 pixel isn’t a lot of space.  The image has to project, in a clear and direct manner, the aroma of your game experience.  If your game is about jumping squids, then have a squid jumping in the air.  Don’t just put a squid strolling through a park.  There is no room for mystery–just say it like it is.

3. Stand Out From the Crowd

You want to pick bright, simple colors that stand out. Keep it to 1 or 2, and don’t try to make a fancy background. At 57×57, it will get muddy and make the image hard to read. Consider the emotion that your game conveys and incorporate that into your logo… red is good for action games, while blue is a calmer color suitable for less stressful games.

4. Meet Expectations

Whatever you do, make sure that your game is able to meet the expectations generated by your app icon.  It’s important to get the feel of the game through, but you shouldn’t oversell, and submit an icon that creates a false expectation about your game’s experience.  You don’t want to start the game experience with people feeling like they’ve been cheated into a purchase for an experience that doesn’t exist.