--- title: "\"What do you want me for then?\" The icon designer's dilemma in the age of AI" description: "Matthew Skiles has spent 15 years hand-crafting the app icons you see all over WWDC videos — and he got his start with no portfolio, no formal training, and a lucky break." language: "en" publishedAt: "2026-07-29T12:38:31.609Z" updatedAt: "2026-07-29T12:38:31.609Z" authors: - name: "Charlie Chapman" url: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/author/charlie-chapman" category: "Growth" categoryUrl: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth" canonical: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/matthew-skiles-icon-visual-designer-launched-podcast-2026" --- # "What do you want me for then?" The icon designer's dilemma in the age of AI Matthew Skiles has spent 15 years hand-crafting the app icons you see all over WWDC videos — and he got his start with no portfolio, no formal training, and a lucky break. ## Table of contents - ["If I was a smart businessman, I wouldn't have made that decision"](#if-i-was-a-smart-businessman-i-wouldnt-have-made-that-decision) - [The most common icon mistake: your symbol is too big](#the-most-common-icon-mistake-your-symbol-is-too-big) - [AI hasn't replaced him — but it has created a strange new client problem](#ai-hasnt-replaced-him-but-it-has-created-a-strange-new-client-problem) - [He has thoughts about Liquid Glass](#he-has-thoughts-about-liquid-glass) - [Guest links:](#guest-links) Matthew Skiles is the designer behind an absurd number of indie app icons — including the Launched airplane itself, which he redrew when Charlie rebooted the show. Go to[ matthewskiles.com](https://matthewskiles.com) and start scrolling, and you'll recognize icon after icon. His work shows up on the wall of icons in WWDC videos, and last year the Tide Guide icon he designed was held up on camera in Apple's WWDC rap video. [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GWNH4o91Mw) None of it started with credentials. Skiles is a self-taught designer from the South Island of New Zealand who built his first website at 15 from an HTML book, coding a one-pager for a tennis coach with his brother. His first app icon was for Rock'n Rockets, an iPhone game the two brothers shipped themselves — covered twice on MacStories, played by maybe a hundred people. When paid icon work finally arrived around 2014, it didn't come through a portfolio, because he didn't have one. "My initial app icon work was people I already knew from other projects," he says. "I didn't have the portfolio of any kind to show anyone that I can do app icons, but they knew my work already and they had enough faith in me to give it a shot." From there, the strategy was simple and stubborn: only post the icon work, never the web work, first on Dribbble and later on Twitter — until Christian Selig commissioned alternate icons for Apollo and put his name in front of a massive audience. ## **"If I was a smart businessman, I wouldn't have made that decision"** App icons are just about the worst consulting business you can pick: short engagements, little repeat work, a constant need for the next client. Charlie asked how he squares that, and Skiles didn't pretend there was a clever strategy. "If I was a smart businessman, I wouldn't have made that decision, but I make decisions based on it's fun," he says. "It was not a smart business decision. I'm still not sure if it's a smart business decision, but it keeps working, so I'll keep doing it." What makes it keep working is the scale of the App Store itself. After a career's worth of icons, he's still surprised: "How can there be more apps and more people that I haven't worked with? But there's always a new person who comes along and says, 'I've got a new app and I want you to make an app icon.'" It's a job that didn't exist when he was a kid — and it exists now because Apple built an ecosystem where developers are expected to care about how their icon looks. ## **The most common icon mistake: your symbol is too big** Skiles's process is more analog than you'd guess. He sketches roughly ten concepts in pencil on paper printed with half-icon grids, builds the winning shape in Illustrator, refines in Sketch, and only reaches for Photoshop when something needs texture — "there's no better tool for building textured things than Photoshop," whatever people say about those apps being dead. Color comes last, only after the shape is settled. His philosophy runs against the obvious instinct. The best icons, he argues, aren't literal representations of the app — think Transmit's truck or Coda's leaf. "The app icon will make them be like, 'I'll give it a shot because I want that in my dock.'" A utility you use every day should be something you like having around, the same way you'd rather own a nice pen than an ugly one. And for anyone designing their own icon, he offers the single most common fix: shrink your symbol. People scale their logo up until it fills the squircle, and it almost never looks right. "Just give it a bit of breathing room. Just shrink it down just a little bit and it'll look nicer." Even Apple's own grid circle is often too generous — "you actually want to be a little smaller than that." ## **AI hasn't replaced him — but it has created a strange new client problem** Skiles doesn't use AI in his own work ("I love the process of doing it myself"), but it's already changed his client relationships in two opposite ways. **The good:** AI images are a genuinely useful communication tool. When a client arrives with a generated reference, "it gives them a way to convey that to me, whereas it would've taken a lot longer to find what it is they're looking for." **The bad:** infinite generation creates choice paralysis. Clients show up with AI-generated options, he recommends a direction, and "then they will go and generate 50 more options... at some point you have to make a choice so I can go in that direction with you." Worse is when a client falls in love with a specific AI image and just wants it reproduced: "You're almost stuck trying to replicate the AI design for people, and you're like, 'What do you want me for then, if you just want me to redraw that thing for you?'" His overall stance is deliberate patience — the same wait-and-see approach he once took with Sketch before it won him over. Tools get easier to adopt over time, so there's little risk in watching first. The one area pulling him in: custom generators for textures and assets, where the designer keeps control over what's being generated. ## **He has thoughts about Liquid Glass** Skiles lived through the great flattening of iOS 7 — which, he says, made him better, because "before that you had details and textures to hide behind... you just had to have a great shape." He loved the Big Sur era, where icons fit the squircle by convention but could still break out of it: "an advised constraint versus a forced constraint, I think, gives the best results." Tahoe's mandatory glass frame is another matter. Icon Composer saves him real time when a client wants a system-native look across platforms, but the non-negotiable edge highlight grates: "If it was up to me, that effect wouldn't exist. Let people put glass within the icon, but just don't put it on the frame... But this is the world we live in. We accept what Apple gives us and we find a way to make it work." In [the full episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GWNH4o91Mw), Matthew also talks about the lost golden age of the Dribbble design community, why he almost never gets Android icon work, the current trend of custom glass shaders and mesh gradients, and the delicious-era Mac designers — Jasper Hauser's AppZapper ray gun among them — that he's still chasing: "When I was a kid, that was my dream, and it's still my dream now." ## Guest links: - [Matthew Skiles's portfolio](https://matthewskiles.com/) - [Matthew Skiles on X](https://x.com/matthewskiles) - Matthew is also on Mastodon and Bluesky as @matthewskiles