Article in Product Design UX UI category.

Design Challenge: Week 10

Every 2 weeks, the design team here at Fueled task themselves with a design challenge. The task at hand is fairly simple; we take a brief from a pool of suggestions and tackle it in just 2 hours. However, there are no winners in the design challenge. Taking a break from projects for a little while proves invaluable to us to share our ideas, explore our processes, and grow as designers. We've been low on numbers in recent weeks, but ladies and gentlemen, this week we have a full house! This week's challenge was, yet again, from the unparalleled genius that is Ryan Murphy.

The Brief

You get a style and genre to work within, and have to design a small icon set in response.

The Submissions

Dan Makepeace

"My words were Music and Minimal. I went with a simple line style for some generic music icons. I added in the pastel colored background shapes to give the set a cohesive feel. The best 15 minutes of my day!"

Glenn Hitchcock

"A bunch of two-tone, shopping icons, attempting to avoid using the stereotypical basket or trolley! I wanted to go for something a bit Warhol-ish here in colour, like a 60s wall-collage, and focus mainly on icons that are most relevant to the online shopping experience.

I love using negative space wherever possible to convey an area of an icon, and giving things a bit of depth with layering."

Emily Cressey

"My words were 'Gaming' and 'Abstract'. I wanted to create well known game controllers but out of the least shapes possible. I also wanted to make them colourful and a bit playful to fit with the 'abstract' style."

Andrew Power

"I got the words Tools and Realistic. I wanted to go for something a bit different, because in my mind make-up is still a set of tools. I like how these came out, particularly the lipstick one."

Alex Lockey

"My words were Technology and Abstract.

I tackled this brief by not thinking about a specific technology of business but to think in an abstract way to generalise the icon set.

New technologies and their use are sometimes hard to design for, so a more metaphorical or abstract way to reference the technology and its use are needed.

This set hints at process cycle, collaboration and possibly sharing of data or information.

To further push the technology aspect of the set I applied depth and motion by the use of subtle grads and transparency."

Mike Barton

"So I like history, and I like elaborate icons. My words were Nature and Thin, so I thought I'd recreate each epoch of evolution through time with a single signifying animal. I enjoyed doing these little guys, think they'd work well on badges. There were some scary animals knocking about in the early days of Earth I'll tell you that."

James Lindsay

"My words were 'Banking' and 'Two-tone'.

I wanted to attempt some isometric icons, using two-tone shading to add a layer of depth."

Tom Graham

"So my words were Shopping and Two-Tone. I went for minimalism, and tried to keep the style consistent with a slight offset shading, whilst giving each icon enough unique character. I feel these would scale down quite well."

Ryan Murphy

"Wow, where to begin, I just love icons. I got chunky and sports, if you knew me, it's a perfect fit.

I wanted to allude to that patch, sewn on aesthetic. I wanted to avoid too many obvious symbols for each sport, where I could, so nothing felt too alike.

For cricket I love the ball hitting the stumps in particular. Each colour is loosely related to the sport, All Blacks for rugby, duke red for cricket, chalk for snooker and khaki for golf."

Sean Kerry

"My prompts were fashion and minimal. I was inspired by the very free and loose pencil sketches of fashion designers. I wanted to portray a garment with just the bare minimum of line work whilst still giving the icons some personality too.

I sketched out some fashion items and applied different thickness of various brush strokes to give an organic feel. The icons on their own felt like they needed a little something extra to bring them to life so I added in the large coloured brush strokes to the background."

Catherine Hopkins

"My two words were art and hard. I first started sketching objects like an easel and palette, but didn't feel too inspired. Then I started drawing the mona lisa in this angular style and thought it would be fun to create a little portrait series. Tried my best to stick to 90° and 45° angles, but I couldn't get the familiarity right by restricting to just them two.

Started with just the outlines above, but the Marilyn portrait looked odd without its pop arty colours. So I brought them all to life in full colour."

André Gonçalves

"My Two words were “Health” And “Line”.

I started by designing different health related icons and went with these 4 since it was the ones that worked better in this combination of thick lines and dots.

For consistency I set up the constrain of doing this in a 12px by 12px grid."

Next Time

Cracking challenge this week, and some great submissions. See you all again in a couple of weeks for the next challenge!