[VIS] Iconography — A noob perspective
Designing icons requires patience, trial and error, and consistency across the board. I made a lot of mistakes here and I’m prepared to make more — if only to learn.
If given the chance, would I redo these from scratch? Yes I would… Wait, maybe I should rethink that.
It’s been quite a month, I’ve repeatedly said I would finish DBTC’s Visual Identity System (VIS) last month, then the last, and once more another month. It’s a process really, trial and error, looking up to various resources to see what’s right and what’s not.
Disclaimer: I don’t have any educational background with regards to graphic design, I’ve gained this knowledge mostly through online resources, my sister (who’s a full-fledged media practitioner), and hours and hours of YouTube and practice.
Designing icons is an art, well mostly for me it’s due to the fact that designing icons that are scalable but still have an appeal and a unique identity is quite challenging. The question is how would you design an icon that’ll be visible and understandable both when it’s 30x30 and 1000x1000 pixels wide, so it’s about making the icon simple, understandable, universal even, don’t add too much details, just a flair or a touch of the brand that you’re incorporating into your design.
Now DBTC, or Don Bosco Philippines for that matter, has always had a knack for using a gear and laurel combination in ALL of our logos and icons, the problem is most of these aren’t uniform or even symmetrical at all, a ton of them use arbitrary design elements or even from (gulp) Google images or other open online resources. It didn’t take me long to decide on how to spice up the social media icons, why reinvent the wheel? you just have to make it look and function better.
My design process was simple enough, use a 30x30 canvas (okay I cheated, I used a 60x60 canvas) in Adobe Illustrator or your program of choice. I chose Adobe Illustrator over Photoshop simply because it’s path-based, unlike Photoshop which is pixel-based, meaning that scaling would be a breeze.
Before doing this I had no idea of how to make icons, all I’ve ever done were logos that were a tad too complicated for the world of iconography, pushing forward though, it was pretty valuable for me to incorporate the rules of symmetry throughout the icons, there are some notable exceptions though, but for the most part, (I think) I got it right.
The image above shows five revisions of the DBTC social media icons, all of them needing to be painstakingly edited one by one, then having to resize it over and over, putting it beside existing graphic templates for use in the VIS. It was in this experience that I got to know how icons are really made and how I got to appreciate each and all the small details designers painstakingly work for, all just to make us a little less OC’d when finding that poop emoji on our keyboards.
Making it though was another challenge in itself, after consulting with sis and the overlords at Google, I found out the best method to maintain symmetry was to base my vector elements off of shapes, it was a foolproof method that did prove a little harder than it first looked. The process of cutting out shapes within shapes over and over whilst retaining the symmetry had reminded me of our time using AutoCAD, at first it was hard, but I guess muscle memory does take over from there. It’s stressful at first, but the process does give you knowledge and you can definitely apply it towards other aspects of design, especially in this VIS.
Though ofcourse, everything starts with an idea, and it all started with this simple drawing, it was the question of, how would I make the gear and laurel combination as simple as possible, well through the use of onine material, I got to follow a technique which introduced me to the line weights of objects, which then in turn got me to draw the picture above. Simply put, the semicircle in the middle would be 1px wide and the gear “details” above the semicircle would simply be 2px wide, no more fuss about measurements!
It took time, but after a while, around two to three days of straight staring at my monitor and walking around with the thought of the icons in my head, I did get it finished.
My only hope now, is that those who are tasked to carry out graphic work within DBTC would carry on this design mantra in a consistent manner.
