IXD303 Healthcare Project : Iconography and Imagery

Iconography

I love icons. They are incredibly valuable from an accessibility standpoint but also they are the perfect outlet for bringing some character and personality to an interface and that’s why they are my favourite thing to design.

Some Research

I learned all about icon design way back in the IXD104 module of Imaging and data visualisation and I’ve made a few decent icon sets since then so I feel pretty confident that I know what I’m doing when it comes to iconography. I did visit this Design Systems complete guide to iconography for a little brush up though.

 

Inspiration

Screen Printing

My main source of inspiration for the icons was  Risograph/screen and lino prints. Theres a current current design trend of designing things digitally to give this overlay style risograph vibe and my app is for 18-25 year olds so it’s gotta be trendy, plus I just thought it would be a really cool idea to have that kinda overlay effect with my icons. It also opens the door for some interesting micro interactions.

Pinterest

As per usual I looked at my iconography pinterest board and I added some icons to my Mend mood board that were sorta like what I had in mind.

Dribbble

I also went on dribbble and in particular I found this designer Radostina Georgieva whose illustrations are a total vibe, so are the vegetables of Nadzeya Makeyeva…

 

My Icons

Sketches

Here are my icon sketches for both my nav icons and also my other iconography I have sprinkled through the prototype…

Assembly

I typically design my icons using illustrator as it’s a lot easier to do on there than Adobe Xd. I do have a plugin for icons on Xd though so I used from there where I could and I also took from free vector icons I got from adobe stock sometimes and just customised them to fit. This kinda helped cat time a bit but I still had a lot of assembly to do myself.

Here are some shot I took while making some of my icons…

 

Final Designs

I’m just gonna stick a link to my prototype so you can see them in action because it’s too tedious to screen shot every single one of them (I made a lot) and stick them on here so yeah. You can view them all here.

 

Imagery

This is just a short add on…

I was considering doing illustration instead of using images for things but I decided to use images because I haven’t really implemented them in my projects before and I want to get get better at doing so effectively.

I think a big reason why I avoid photography is because I’m terrified of get caught out by copyright laws or something if I post something to instagram and I’m not sure how attribution would work in within a prototype anyhoo. A resource we were directed to in Week 5 was Unsplash which is essentially a place where people share photographs that you can use in your projects and they’re all under a special unsplash linsence which allows you to use them without having to worry about attributions (unless you want to of course).

So for my project I’m only sourcing images from there. Now this could be challenging for finding an accurate image to match recipe contents like if the picture has carrots in the noodles instead of peppers but ultimately if this was a real product I wouldn’t be using Easy food magazine recipes or using unsplash for images, instead we would have experts coming up with nutritious recipes and excellent photographers and artists sourcing the imagery but the easy food recipes and unsplash photos are just there to give an idea of what it could be and I think that’s the point.

 

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