Over the summer between 1st and 2nd year, I decided to continue creating my own icons as it was a big part of all the modules that I did in first year and I particularly enjoyed creating them to relate to each project, and trying to find an easy to understand design to convey a message quickly to a user. I also created this icon set with the idea that it would expand and get bigger throughout my projects in second year as well.

I also knew that the projects during second year had shorter deadlines, so I wanted to create a set of my own icons that hopefully speed up the process of designing and creating prototypes for these projects. I wanted to reduce the amount of icon designing that I would need to do during these projects so I created 146 of my own icons (and an extra 7 which are the most relevant/popular social media app icons) all in the same style and size. I created all the icons to be 26x26px and only using line weights 2 and 3 throughout the designs to keep them all cohesive to ensure that the icons could all be used together and not look random within one project.

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I created all the icons to the size 26x26px as that is probably the smallest the icons will have to be and I wanted to ensure that the design and what it is trying to convey is easy to understand even at a smaller scale, and they can easily be scaled up in size if needed. I decided to create the most commonly used icons as they would have a wider range of projects that they can be used within, it also means that if I have all the general icons already created I can just focus on project specific icons if there are any, without having to create an entirely new set of icons every time.

When creating some of these icons I used the ones I had already made during some of my projects as a base to work from, and even looking back at the icons I created for a project during my second semester, I was able to find more efficient ways to recreate each design, and I was able to create these icons faster and they also just looked neater and more refined than my original versions even if I had only created the originals a couple months before. While I was creating these icons I felt that I definitely had a better understanding of Figma and the process of designing icons effectively than I did earlier in the year.

Currently there are 9 main categories of icon that I have created:

People

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Transport & Time

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General Settings

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Devices

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General Menus

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Mail & Sharing

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Arrows

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Audio

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