Latest Nova Launcher update lets you rescale icon size with the new Icon Normalization feature

The populace was thrilled when Nova Launcher started toying with icon normalization in beta. For ease of on-sight recognition, Google has always encouraged developers to give their icons a “unique silhouette,” but this variety comes with an aesthetic cost. Varying icon dimensions can make your tray look like an absolute mess. Nova’s new algorithm promises to scale up undersized icons to give your home screen and tray a consistent feel, and the update finally available to everybody in the Google Play Store.

Scaling icons is kind of a tricky process. You might think that you would only need to bring them all up to the same dimensions, but this isn’t the case. Although the icons would technically exist in equally sized ‘frames,’ the problem is that the human eye regards consistency in terms of area. If a circle icon and a square icon with the same width are adjacent to each other, the square will look much larger than the circle.

Nova Launcher’s icon normalization process has the ability to identify different shapes and scale them such that icons have a consistent area. It’s a pretty smart feature, and it isn’t limited to identifying simple shapes. It also considers any protrusions or extensions that the icon has and realigns the image to fit more naturally in a grid.

The developer received a lot of feedback during beta to adjust the algorithm, and the results are pretty awesome. In addition to adding the icon normalization, the new Nova Launcher update also includes Marshmallow style search bars in color and grayscale, runtime permissions on Marshmallow, and a handful of optimizations and bug fixes. Once you get the update, you can turn on icon normalization in the Look and Feel menu. Even if you don’t have a premium license for Nova, you’ll still be able to have access to this feature.