I got myself introduced to icon design just a couple of weeks ago after watching Adam Whitcroft's course Create a Cohesive Icon Set and continuing to Creating Pictograms with Purpose by Edward Boatman.

Those two courses were enough reason to set myself up to a challenge; to pick a theme every other day and design 9 icons that depict it. As if that wasn't enough, I received an e-mail mentioning this workshop. I had no excuse not to take on the challenge!

Icon Design Workshop - My version of icons for Skillshare! - image 1 - student project Lighting the spark

As with everything new, I had no clue what I was about to design or how I wanted it to look.

What I did was to grab a piece of paper and start drawing whatever comes to mind that reminds me of the icons in question.

I set no constraints, no guidelines and I was not trying to keep consistency. I just let my thoughts flow freely and let things happen.

Embracing the guidelines

Choosing the outline colour

After being done with the ideation part, I started visualising the icons as part of the Skillshare ecosystem in order to decide on a visual path I deemed fit to follow.

The next step was to choose the outline colour I will be using from the colour palette given to us. I went for black as I wanted something more generic and neutral.

The idea behind this decision is that icons whose colour is the primary colour of a business's brand identity, tend to be used as CTAs. Having that in mind, I decided I wanted to experiment on promoting calls to action from the icons, without them being used as such.

Messing with the sizes

It is stated that the icons will be used on various sizes, often as small as 16x16px. This was enough for me to understand that the icons I will be designing should be minimal, with as little detail as possible yet clearly conveying their purpose and message.

In order to achieve that, I decided to design the icons on a 64x64px artboard, followed by two complimentary artboards at the size of 32x32px and 16x16px. If the icon looks as good on those three scales, I go on, otherwise, I cmd+A, delete and start over without keeping the old iteration as a reference in order not to be negatively influenced by it.

Milestone #1

For the first milestone, I chose to design the play and download icons. As mentioned, I will be designing the icons on three different sizes, so, I included them on the preview below.

Icon Design Workshop - My version of icons for Skillshare! - image 2 - student project

Milestone #2

Nothing to see here yet but stay tight, I will be uploading updates as I progress through the workshop.

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What do you think of the path I chose to follow and the first two icons? Let me know in the comments below. Your feedback not only helps me improve the icon pack, it is also a great way to hone my design skills!

Lefteris Psitopoulos

Doing something great everyday

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