Awhile back now I completed an interesting commission from The Harvard Business Review Magazine to create icons to accompany various thematic topics and articles. It’s tricky stuff simplifying/illuminating a concept into a printable area literally 6mm square!

In order to successfully visualize the idea into an immediately recognizable image requires a bit of planning and skill. I   researched some personal favourites in  the history of pictograms, Isotope and the everlasting modernism of the 1968 Mexico Olympics pictograms by a team including Lance Wyman.

Initiating ideas in sketches and then road testing, throwing out ideas, brain storming, innovating are all part and parcel to this somewhat brain wracking activity. I enjoyed the challenges of the job and whilst demanding  was happy with the final results which were an individual contemporary instalment into the language of iconography/pictograms. I think!

 

roughs HBR_icons