What’s in an icon?  A lot.  Quite simply: it is the single most viewed part of your entire application, and it’s a major part of your brand.

So, when I tell you that based on design reviews and user reviews, we’ve updated icon sizes for BlackBerry® 10, changing from 150×150 to 114×114, you can either take the approach of saying: ok, great, my existing icon will automatically scale down or you can take care to make sure you update your icon accordingly.  I recommend the latter.

If you’re migrating your app from the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ to BlackBerry 10 smartphones, you’ll want to pay even more attention to your icons: you’re moving from an 86×86 icon size up to 114×114.  Scaling up your images is definitely a much worse experience than scaling down – pixilation looks cheap and to the user, your app will stand out on their application screen as “one of these things is not like the others,” but for all the wrong reasons.

For the full details on the new size plus a lot of great tips for design considerations for your icons on BlackBerry 10, check out the updated BlackBerry UI Guidelines document.  And hey, when you’re done looking over the guidelines for the icons, check out the rest of the document too.  It’s full of useful tips for making your application look and feel its best on BlackBerry 10.

For those of you with BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices, you’ll see this change take effect in the November beta OS drop.