Icon design

The Icon Iceberg

Company and Sector: Guidewire, Inc (Property and Casualty Insurance Tech)
Objective: Redesign 200+ icons for visual design and concept consistency
Role: Co-Designer (2 Designer team)
Project duration: 9 months

Overview
Guidewire products are used by insurance companies like Geico and Nationwide for internal use and for their end users. The products used internally needed an icon refresh.

200 functional icons needed refresh

Icon size varied across products
Look and feel was dated
Few cases had different visuals for the same concept.
New icons needed consistent size
Consistent and modern look and feel
Conceptual integrity across products
Ease of maintenance

The left navigation needed 44 new icons

Long list of functions in left nav
Needed visual representation for readability and to break monotony
More visual weight (bigger size, more fill)
Modern look and feel consistent with the functional icons
Conceptual integrity
Ease of maintenance

Identifying the principles of icon design
The design team spent around 3-4 weeks to identify a robust set of principles for icon design.

Creating a base glyph with modifiers

Several icon concepts belonged to one family
Need to look similar, while reflecting minor differences
Used concept of a base icon/glyph with a modifier

E.g. a family of icons had the concept of a policy. Different icons needed to show that the policy period had expired, or the policy period was for the future.

Experimentation for left navigation icons

The left navigation icons needed more visual weight to stand out in comparison to the functional icons.
To achieve this we experimented with:
- bigger size (20px x 20px)
- thicker stroke (1.25px, 1.5 px)
- using a partial or full fill

After trying out various combinations, we landed on a 20px x 20px grid, with a partial fill on some shapes.

Biggest challenge was creating visuals for complex industry terms

Coming to a consensus on what an abstract idea should look like and capturing it in a 16px x 16px space.