Business Case: the Client is a market leader in medical emergency simulators, developing and updating a considerably large array of devices, simulators, hardware’s and software’s.   This wide amount of touch-points also implies that the UI Designs are adapted to different geographical localizations, which also can change over time (including different icons standards and visual requirements).

Design challenge: acknowledged the impossibility to utilize exactly the same design system throughout the entire portfolio, imagine a system that can satisfy the widest amount of cases, including semiotic combinations, as a unified icon-library.

1.  My endeavor on this task started as a side-project, after being consulting on-site for more than six months immersed in the amazing R&D and Design spaces of this Company. This gave me a privileged position for my first step: collection and organization of a wide amount of pictures of icons and pictograms already in use in the current portfolio.

2. I assigned a ‘tag’ to each asset collected, so to be able to visualize which ones correspond to the same semiotic (as doubles, or triples) and which ones are instead utilized to cover different semiotics on different touch-points.

3. I then interviewed the internal experts in order to collect information about the complains that have been so far raised about the existing assets. I also collected the available information about the future directions, visions and UI Design concepts; which also came for me as a privileged position, because that was the main scope of my contract.

4. Given the considerable amount of icons intended to represent a combination of two semiotics (i.e. surgical nurse, orthopedical nurse, etc..) I created an archetype icon grid, in which the main icon is a container (i.e. nurse) and the secondary icon is a content (i.e. surgical).

5. I applied the new icons to the design a UI prototype that I was also working on, so to be able to get realistic renditions on different devices and formats. I collected learnings and feedbacks through this UI prototype, and used it to refine and finalize the icons library.