They need­ed help to cre­ate mod­ern and appeal­ing icons for their var­i­ous appli­ca­tions, which will visu­al­ize and match the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced solu­tions. In addi­tion to appli­ca­tion icons, a set of con­sis­tent icons were also need­ed to be used in their process tools Flow.

Novacu­ra also want­ed to be able to use the appli­ca­tion icons in oth­er con­texts such as print­ed mat­ter, back drops and films. There­fore, all graph­ics were made as vec­tor graph­ics in Adobe Illus­tra­tor, so that the final deliv­ery (in addi­tion to the icon files them­selves) was orig­i­nals that can be scaled up with­out any qual­i­ty loss.

Flow is a pro­gram for cre­at­ing process flows in a sim­ple and intu­itive way, in a view sim­i­lar to a draw­ing pro­gram. As an icon, we there­fore cre­at­ed a half-rolled draw­ing, with process arrows that are on their way out of the draw­ing.

The process­es you cre­ate in the appli­ca­tion will lat­er take place in real life for exam­ple order man­age­ment or pro­duc­tion. We also added a pen to get the feel­ing that the user is cre­at­ing some­thing of their own, and to get a bet­ter com­po­si­tion in the icon.

Texo is an inte­gra­tion plat­form, and is far more abstract to visu­al­ize. We sketched out dif­fer­ent ideas with arrows and flows that were merged, but it was dif­fi­cult to inter­pret the icons and they became too aca­d­e­m­ic. We chose instead to return the draw­ing idea from Flow, but with a gear that sym­bol­izes the auto­mat­ic process. It is clear that the appli­ca­tions belong to the same suite, but do com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent things.

In addi­tion to these, we also cre­at­ed an icon for mobile devices, which also had to be quite abstract as it should be able to cov­er a num­ber of pos­si­ble uses. As a sym­bol of sim­plic­i­ty and ease, we chose a feath­er. Light­ing and per­spec­tives were cho­sen accord­ing to the guide­lines of the Android inter­face as the pro­gram will main­ly be used on such devices. We also designed a gen­er­al web icon with the same process arrows around a globe, as well as a doc­u­ment symbol.

The icons were also sup­ple­ment­ed with scaled out­line vari­ants used in pho­tographs and oth­er graph­ics where you want to be more subtle.

New, uni­form, icons were also need­ed for use in Flow. To be able to scale the inter­face step­less­ly (to get a good overview) it was required that the icons were sim­ple and clear. We worked on giv­ing each icon a dis­tinct col­or and sil­hou­ette, so that it is easy to dis­tin­guish them from each oth­er even in very zoomed-out loca­tions where they are only a few pix­els large.

Dur­ing the fall of 2014, we pro­duced a num­ber of illus­tra­tions for use in pre­sen­ta­tions and mar­ket­ing. These sym­bol­ize Novac­u­ra’s var­i­ous focus seg­ments, as well as the peo­ple who work with­in them. The illus­tra­tions are adapt­ed for a par­tial­ly redesigned visu­al lan­guage with a flat­ter and more mod­ern feel. At the same time, we are updat­ing oth­er icons and illus­tra­tions accordingly.

Both we and the cus­tomer are very sat­is­fied with the work done, and we look for­ward to see­ing the icons imple­ment­ed in the sharp soft­ware in the future.