Reflection - This class was learning about the different ways that icons can be displayed, something I picked up from class is that icons are meant to transcend language, that they have to be internationally recognised like in airports. No matter what language which is why it's so important that they are clear, readable, and recognisable as they are the visual language for everyone.
Good icon designs allow the user to have a great user experience as they don't have to question if it's the correct button, allowing them to navigate the interface easily.
We looked into the history behind where icons come from, one of the earliest examples of icons being used comes from the Egyptians and the hieroglyphs which are described as pictorial writing. The word hieroglyphs come from the Greek translation ‘sacred carving’ for the Egyptian phrase ‘the god’s words’. All of the Egyptian words are made up of pictures and not meant to be words but phonetic values - representing speech sounds by means of symbols that have one value only.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyph
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phonetic
Vic Bell is an illustrator, iconographic, and brand designer. He lives in Durham and works as a senior illusion for Gitlab. He is also a very family-oriented person with lots of passion projects that he does for fun whilst also working with very large companies like Uber to create their iconography and Burberry which was for their iconography. I really like his work and the breakdown of his projects, I can understand how he ended up with a great result this is also especially handy as a young designer as I can see the way he works to create his designs.
One of my favorite projects is the Burberry iconography, it's such a classic brand with a long history it was formed in 1856 by Thomas Burberry. Vic's brief was to create an icon set for their website redesign which then requires the icons to be able to work over multiple sizes whilst still maintaining the classical feel of the brand, he started with some of the most known things like the delivery van and the storefront in London, creating these icons below with the different sizes and the icons altered for each, I love these as they are all still icon at each size and have been so well adapted to each.
These are the other icons created for the website they have specific uniformity, they were made on the 28px grid, he chose the stroke width of 3px with no rounded corner, and he had a 3px rule on either side of the icon (this can be broken if needed), if the shape is extended outwards it needs 6px for balance. If a rounded corner is needed it should be 3px, any points should start at 3px, optical correctness will need to be considered and altered to balance, and spacing between the strokes in icons should be mostly 2px as any lower will become muddy. These are the rules he made for the icons to make them uniform, as a result, he has created these really good icons that display the principles of icon design.
https://www.vicbell.co.uk/burberry
https://uk.burberry.com/c/our-history/
Tim Van Damme is a software designer based in Belgium, after spending 8 years in the US. He has worked for Instagram, Dropbox, Abstract, and Gowalla, And is currently working for Figma. He also enjoys side projects creating icon sets. Like these icons below which caught my eye for the vibrancy, it's from a side project in 2018. I really like these and the colours add a lot to them, I am unaware if these are meant to be a set or not. I don't believe these are which make sense as they would be an inconsistent set from width, style, and colour palette. I do like his style however with the very playful icons.
https://usesthis.com/interviews/tim.van.damme/
I started looking at Spotifys icon set design which was updated in 2022 which was completed by Andreas Holmstrom a senior product designer, who has been on Spotifiys team for 10 years, Rob Bartlett is an icon designer who has 25years of interaction design experience, they also credit the Encore team. The issue that they were trying to tackle was the original icons were the weight of the icons, as they had altered the size of the music tiles which made it very off-balance and out of proportion and improved the readability. So they refreshed the existing icons and changed the stroke size for different sizes of icons. Other icons were redrawn for readability especially as the stroke size increased. They also did something really clever when looking at the icons they also decided to change the active icons for clarity before it was the weight that changed now the weight same and they created a filled version instead. I do think they were successful with their aims its a lot more readable and balanced.
