: Modern UI icon - Blur In an imaging app I'm working on, I want to enable the user to apply a blur filter to the image. Bit creating an icon for that filter isn't easy. Should I Draw a

@Cugini998

So how about a Gaussian icon i suggested earlier something like this quick mockup:



There is a lot of tehcnical reasons for this icon since blur is generally a diffusion effect and the Gaussian is what you'd get if you let the middle bar diffuse over time while feeding energy in. It might be too technical tough.

But like the drop icon it can be made simple enough to be visible at smaller sizes. The drop being in general a good candidate for pure artists as water is used to diffuse out paint. This may not be so good for other audiences tough.

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@Samaraweera207

Everything I can come up with looks kind of terrible, but these might give you some other ideas:

Half focused, half blurry element:



Partially blurred element, but the challenge is to differentiate that portion enough. You could use some other element to bring attention to the blurred part:



And the one I think has potential, blurred element BUT with defined borders. Something you can associate with blur, like a street picture on a rainy day. So in this case the blur is not applied to the element, but the element works as a sort of transport for the message inside:



EDIT: DA01's comment is right on spot. Scaling any of these would be quite tricky. Last option would be, in my opinion, to use a symbol for the tool rather than the effect:



Or you could combine all the previous and use a less literal representation of blur, solid shapes with decreasing opacity for example. If your app doesn't have other similar tools, you might get away with it:

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