Animal Crossing Style App Icons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a social-simulation game for the Nintendo Switch. In game, your character has a mobile phone complete with its own mobile applications.

As a fun challenge, I decided to redesign over 30 of the current apps on the market in Animal Crossing’s style to bring that aesthetic to your phone in real life, utilizing a consistent color palette and icon styles.

This is personal project, not affiliated with Nintendo.

Process

I began by studying the Animal Crossing style to understand the color palette and art style of the game’s icons. From this I gathered a few key points.

• the color palette is pastel and light

• some flat icons borrow from modern UI trends

• other icons borrow from real world items leaning more towards illustrations

• icons tend to have small details inside even when flat, but are not overly complex

• icon strokes tend to be more uniform in width

With certain apps, I brought references from the franchise that any fan would appreciate. For example, I decided to redraw the Telegram icon as an illustration as noted from my initial style notes, but also a specific type of paper airplane, from the Animal Crossing collaboration with Mario Kart.