Icon Case Study
Recently I have had the opportunity to work as a design intern at Pave, and one of my roles was helping create clear and consistent icons to be used for the company website, slide decks, and other branding materials. Icons not only add visual interest but help to further communicate ideas or actions. In this case study I’ll be walking you through the process of creating an icon.
The icon I’ll be focusing on is for Growth Mindset.
Finding Inspiration
The first step is inspiration, so I headed to The Noun Project, a great resource for icons and icons inspiration and searched words related to what Growth Mindset represented.
When it comes to icons, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are already associations people make between words and imagery and it is essential to play on that. When I think of the word “growth”, plants, moving upwards, and seeds come to mind. For inspiration I searched these words on the noun project to see existing examples.
In my iteration of the logo, my goal was to achieve the following:
Accessibility: I used a font that is scalable and while still being legible. Although a thin lined icon could look good large, you have to consider how it would look shrunken down at the top of a page.
Clarity: This icon is two leaves connected to a stem and it is hard to miss. The icon is representative of growth but the icon itself is not representative. It is a literal plant, and trying to abstract the concept further can lead to confusion.
Consistency: Below the Growth Mindset icon are icons already in use. By following the same pattern of simplicity, line weight, and rounded edges the new icon I created looks like it belongs in the same set.
When creating an icon for a set, you don’t always know where it will be used. I made sure that the icon I created could still hold it’s meaning when taking on slightly different forms depending on what’s appropriate.
Following the logic used, earlier I was able to construct a full set of icons to be used in for the website, slides, and other branding materials.