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The Icon Kaleidoscope

Storytelling, 3D Design, Art Direction

Credits

Creative Direction –
Nando Costa

Creative Writing –

Joline Tang
3D Design & Art Direction – Alexis Copeland

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To commemorate the launch of a redesign effort that would revisit over one hundred icons across Microsoft, Jon Friedman released an article to share the team's learnings, obstacles, and successes with the community at large. To assist in the article's story, I created a variety of imagery seen below.

 

Successfully developing a company–wide design story meant understanding each designer's point of view, so Joline and I kicked off a round of interviews. We learned that every design decision, from creating a connected system of shapes, to a flexible and expansive design system, to a shared color palette, to capturing a sense of depth and materiality, to the process of interviewing customers along the way, etc; all were carefully considered in the creation of the story's imagery at the same time. 

 

To represent a connected system of shared pieces and parts, we created imagery capturing the spirit play and process within a dimensional space. The set design hopes to capture our slightly imperfect humanity, with scattered objects here and there and sketches that spread across the frame. We wanted to showcase the system's humble and iterative design process. 

For the imagery highlighting our new mixed reality icons for Microsot Dynamics, I opted for animation that could show off the icon design across all dimensions.

 

Another inspiration was Jon's phrase "cut from the same cloth". This phrase helped to capture cohesive energy in the visuals for both Edge and Office. You'll see that metaphor interpreted through both rolls of paper, dimensional bends, and folds of ribbon.

 

Joline's creative writing and management, along with Nando's creative direction was the first of many fruitful collaborations within our small storytelling group. And this creative energy later went on to help us establish a fresh perspective for storytelling over at Microsoft Design.

And finally, thank you Ryan Gagnier and Annice Jumani for helping photograph imagery for this project.

 

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