Currently living in Durham, United Kingdom, Vic Bell is an Illustrator, iconographer and brand designer who has been professionally creating premium and quality material for the past 7 years. She currenly is a senior illustrator working for GitLabs and has a well-structured and established online presence to showcase her work.
Illustrations & Graphic Designs
While Bell approaches her work in a variety of artistic techniques and styles, the above illustrations really stand out to me as her use of incomplete strokes create a sense of connectivity throughout the illustration. Also, the use of geometry to create a well-structured and balanced visual piece and having the occasional colour offset adds slight opposition to this.
I really like these kinds of illustrations as these could create a professional and modern art style throughout my app, they are also perfect for creating a profile character which many travel apps have.
Icons
With a renowned online presence, Bell has created content for multiple large well-established companies such as Uber in which she was approached by them in 2017 to make over 300 scalable icons for their mobile app.
Looking at her icons I noticed they are well structed and proportionate whilst still presenting an inviting and playful look due to her use of constant round geometry and rounded caps. This look greatly inspires me to create similar looking icons for my work.
Guides
Vic’s ability to condense visual information into a tiny icon and then scale it down further while remaining consistent and retaining plenty of visual information is impressive, this is especially relevant to creating smaller icons such as map markers for my intended app.
Bell minimizes her icons by remaining consistent by not sacrificing stroke weight, instead she removes additional features to the icons and makes double strokes into a single stroke. She also makes main features more prominent by making them darker than other strokes presenting a hagiarchy of shades/colour.
Researching Vic Bell and her work has not only gained me a greater insight of creating icons but also how I can scale icons and maintain them as much as possible to while still holding as much relevant visual information as possible. For my app I want to create the same friendly yet structured style (such as using round caps, round strokes and proportional geometric shapes). This is great practice before I start developing my digital icon set for my app.
Making my own Icons
Using some of Bell’s techniques, I set a task for myself to create an icon set for transportation in my app. I created three icons a car, train and a bus:
Doing this task has helped me practice my illustrative skill in creating icons and understand the methodology of creating icons. I am pleased at the outcome and I look forward to my travel app.