Custom Icons
We totally made some as part of the brand and UI update for Ares, and they’re soooo much better like oh my God.
Custom SVG icons developed by yours truly.
I’ve been working on the brand presence and user interface update for Ares’ client-facing platform for the last 6 months. As the only in-house Product/Visual designer with some seriously limited resources, I’ve been implementing incremental updates to content across the platform. The last several weeks have been applying fresh updates to content for the home page, and I finally just handed off what will hopefully be the last home page tweak: custom icons!
It’s been a LONG time since I’ve called myself a graphic designer, so it was nice to be able to dust off the skills to rework an area of the site that’s been vexing me since I first laid eyes on it (it’s the first image in the gallery below). Inconsistent icon styles, variable spacing, and micro copy that felt clunky, this shit had to GO. So that’s what I did.
Since I’ve been a hardline Adobe hater since they first adopted the subscription model, I developed these vector graphic icons in Figma. The icons themselves didn’t feel completely off-brand, but the styling did, so my biggest goal here was just to tune-up and standardize the style, while applying a minimalist aesthetic that would scale proportionally for mobile.
I played around with a few different styles that explored branded fills, variable visual weights, and proximal relationships to the text to make sure I had a broad spectrum to bring to Ares HQ. Luckily for me, The Decision Makers at Ares, despite not having a background in graphic or technical design, all loved my first choice; the white fill with branded blues.
The platform had a really flimsy relationship with style guides, especially in regards to full-bleed, so as I’ve slowly begun to move us away from that sort of rampant visual bulk, I think we’re also developing a team-wide reverence for the lightness of appropriately distributed negative space. For as much as I gravitated toward the filled styles (which were the first to be developed) they did feel visually heavy in contrast. But hey, you know sometimes you just gotta start and chip away at what’s not needed as you go.
