Graphic Designer
My goal of this project was to create icons that can be used in Dungeons & Dragons as a way of marking effects and statuses of players and enemies. There are a few sets out there but not extremely common, nor do they have any standardized look at this time.
There was a challenge I set for myself with this icon set; no people. I didn’t want to use an outline, silhouette, anything that is just a ‘person’ with the effect on them. When I had reviewed other icons a good 60%-80% were people or people based. A lot of these looked too similar for my taste and became hard to differentiate.
I started with the items that felt most obvious to me. I started with things that would already have common ideas paired to them. (Blessed, Slowed, charmed, hidden) I did this for as many as I felt were obvious, and then sorted them into “completed”, “retouch”, and “change”. Most of the designs in retouch were things I liked but were unclear or had a way to make them more uniform.
It was easy to make icons for spells I had previously used or observed. Near the end I found myself needing to do a lot of extra research on certain spells and conditions to better understand what would represent those spells.
After I had a baseline for all the items, even if some of them were still in ‘retouch’ or ‘change’ I brought them to my friend who is the most experienced with Dungeons and Dragons spells. If he could tell what an icon was without a label, it told me the icon was clear to experienced players/users. My friend and I shot a few ideas and concepts back and forth but the main issue that had emerged was the inability to differentiate effects that are very similar in nature. I took this back to the drawing board and did some additional research on the spells and effects I was strugling with.
Spending some time adjusting some fine details, and finding better ways to differentiate similar effects, I went to another one of my friends with a slightly lower experience level and gave her all the icons without any words and had her pair the list of words to each of the icons. She pointed out to me which ones were obvious, and which options she found more through the process of elimination. We discussed where icons could be further simplified or clarified.
After the final user test I had only a few small details to clean up to ensure the icons held a cohesive look. I finally finished off the set by setting them to the same max width so they will fit within tokens for easy printing.
