My projects in foundation year at UU

IxD – Sketches, Ideas & Progress!

For this workshop, we have been asked to create an icon for an everyday item in our room. I have spent the past three days running ideas, sketching them, watching videos, and doing research about UX and UI. I’ve watched countless videos on this because I was curious what makes a design good and interesting. I spent the first day mainly doing research and the second-day doing sketches and ideas. Making a stylized page of my sketches to present my ideas and thoughts behind them.

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Ideas

The very first sketches and ideas of what I was going to experiment with within this project. There were a lot of different items that I had in mind but three certain objects caught my attention. Because these three items I chose have very distinct looks and it’s very easily recognized. Here are my sketches of how to make them represent what they are in an icon.

First sketches and ideas, requested by Daniel. I’m sorry that it’s mainly in Swedish!

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Book

 

One of the three objects that I chose to work with was a book. Books are getting more and more digitalized so it would be an interesting thing to work with. I started off by studying the book, its anatomy, and how it’s built. What makes a book a book? I have seen loads of apps with book icons, but nothing that highlights what makes a book a book. When I want to read a book, I want to open it and see text, a story. No images or blank pages.

I decided to highlight what I see opening a book, what the majority sees when they open a book.

The pages will never be perfectly aligned with the cover, in this case, hardback. The page will always be slightly smaller because it’s folding. A title, slightly larger than the written text on the page, maybe a bookmark. These are a few elements that we recognize from reading books the traditional way, and I wanted to use that to make people understand that this is an app where they can read books, using familiar elements.

 

I played with the ideas I had to use the element that we are familiar with and these are four examples of what I came up with.

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Lamp

 

The other object out of three I wanted to experiment with was a lamp.
It’s an everyday item that has been around for a very long time in a lot of different shapes and forms. It’s a fairly simple everyday item that has a few characteristics that makes it a lamp. A base, a neck, an on and off button, and of course the lampshade.

The very first thoughts I had when brainstorming my ideas was how to capture what a lamp is and what it does, in an icon. The main features are what I stated earlier, its skeleton, as well as the lampshade. But I wanted to make it clear what it does. I decided to play with a negative effect using black and white. 50/50, one side dark with light outlines and the other side light with dark outlines.

To really capture that the lamp is on and off would be tricky since we tend to use a button now, or our phone. So I looked back at older lamps, what would work and make the vast majority understand that it’s on and off? A lamp string! It’s not as used anymore in some countries but it has been everywhere at one point and it’s symbolic. I played with the idea of the string’s placement depending on which side it was on. Off, shorter string. On, longer string. With these elements, I would be able to create an icon that represents a classic lamp, in a modern way.


Here are my sketches and ideas. I was very inspired by the simple design of the icons that appear when Since it was simple, 2 colours and 50/50. With that, you can create a lot.

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Drawing Mannequin

 

For the last item out of three, I decided to make an icon portraying a Drawing mannequin. It’s an item that many recognize from either practicing anatomy in terms of art or home decor. It has an extremely distinguished appearance, something that people easily recognize. When I studied the object and its main features there are a few things that really makes this item a drawing mannequin. The way it’s built using simple shapes and is ball-jointed. With its unique design, there isn’t much to add since you can already tell what it is. I wanted to play with the idea of an icon that would be easily recognized, inviting, and playful. A drawing mannequin is a posable figure, and it’s mostly associated with a positive figure, which is what I wanted to portray in the icon.

When I experimented with how I could capture the mannequin and its features in a small square without adding too many details, I realized that I had to play a lot with body language, emotions, and positions.  Since I wanted the icon to be inviting I decided to play with the idea of the mannequin waving. Since greeting someone or waving is a friendly and inviting gesture internationally. The other sketches I had were experiments I did just to see what I could do that would be aesthetic and different.

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Experimenting with paper

I had about 12 design ideas between 3 objects and I didn’t want to make it overly complicated, so I chose three of my favourite designs I’ve made for each object and made them into paper icons.

I didn’t photograph the entire progress, but I did capture less than a handful when I made the icon for the lamp.

A picture of half of the sketch with helplines to get it right. Even with care, it did not get right and there was 2mm missing. But it didn’t matter that much.

Here is me carefully cutting bits and pieces of paper off to get it as good as possible.

The finished result of all three designs. Since this is the experimenting phase still, I’m not entirely happy with some stuff. For example, the book can be slightly bigger, since the space around it feels awfully empty.  The lines are not perfect, some are skew and not even. The drawing mannequin looks awfully flat, it was very hard to add good dimensions to him since I wanted to work with either black, white and one colour. There was nothing in between.

There will be much more experimenting digitally week 2.

 

 

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