Vic Bell

Illustrator, Iconographer and Brand designer

Whilst using the Uber app, I always noticed the undeniably cute icons…

little did I know, I would be researching their creator, Vic Bell. That’s the beautiful thing about Interaction design… It is all around us, even if we don’t recognise it all of the time.

Since discovering Vic Bell, I can confirm that she has now been added to my list of idols. Her work is amazing. Colourful. Fun. Clean. Random. Diverse… everything I hope to represent as a designer one day.

Bell is based outside of Durham, England, where she works remotely, as Senior Illustrator for Gitlab, whilst working on her own passion project, Bear.

My personal favourite of all of her projects on her website is her icons for Burberry, which she was approached to create for the redesign of their most recent website. Burberry’s aesthetic is very much alive in her modern icon set. She started with the vintage Burberry delivery van and the famous Regent Street storefront in London.

She then jumped into the icon set and applied those styles and guides that I explored for the more important icons. Bell explored the set at 2 sizes and really wanted to keep that aesthetic for a few of the icons, vintage and classic to keep everything consistently Burberry.

I could stare at her work all day. She goes further into the guidelines, including the grids, spacing, optical correction and key shapes she used when designing the entire icon set. I will be sure to reference Vic Bell’s work for when I need to design my own set of icons. She has a very organised, thematic approach to her work which I really like. Simple yet so effective.