Navtivity Icons

Icons Project for COMM 305 Vector Graphics

Icons are used all over the place these days! I have seen the most on the web and smart phone apps.  For this project I had to create a set of 12 icons.  Deciding what kind of icons to make was probably the hardest part.  I wanted a theme that no one else in the class was doing and I wanted to create a unique style as well.

Message: I want to communicate a homemade Christmas.  I tried to keep the sketch style with a more feminine design of curves and modern colors.

Audience: Crafty festive women. My mom and sisters are always creating holiday decorations and crafts.  Icons like these could used for all sorts of crafts, stationery, blog posts, Christmas cards, etc.

Process: I first sat down and just made lists of icon ideas.  Finally, I thought of Christmas coming and the Nativity.  Then I began sketching.  I tried a drawing a few different styles of Mary until I drew one I really liked.  After that the rest came easy!  The hardest icons to sketch were the animals, especially the camel. Camels are weird! I ended up looking up a picture of a camel and based my sketch off that. I created my people to look similar to the Willow Tree statues.

Sketches

I wasn’t certain how to create my sketches in Illustrator.  I didn’t want them to be geometric, but have a sketchy feel to them.  I ended up using the Adobe Shape app on my Iphone to create images of each sketch.  The app will take a photo of the drawing, but then smooth the lines and give you a crisp render of your drawing.

First Draft

The final icons took a long time to get just right.  I simplified them further and thickened the thin lines. For the color scheme I wanted to incorporate red and green because they are Christmas colors, but also have a rustic tone to them.  I went on Design Seeds to look up different color swatches.  When I found a swatch I really liked, I took it into Photoshop to extract the hex codes and then I used those colors to fill in the white spaces of each icon.

Final Icons