For this project, I wanted to create different icons, showcasing some recognizable traditional head dress, of different culture around the world. The target was to make icons that could be targeted towards children or young people to them learn, or help adults teach them, about other cultures outside of their own. To this extent, the icons were made to be simplistic, as to not overwhelm the learned with fine detail, so that they could be easily understandable for the mind of a child.

Here are a few of my initial sketches. On the left I wanted to get some ideas for different cultures down. I was searching for notable head wear, and what I could work on moving forward, as well as testing a few different designs. After arriving at a few ideas I liked, I went into a drawing phase, where I wanted to nail down a bit more detail, and get some of the stylistic choices down. I settled on circles as a good medium to portray these characters in at this point in the project.

After finishing sketching, and settling on the circle medium to portray my characters, I got to work designing a few notable cultures around the world. But after some critique from peers, it was obvious that the circle was a bit too simplistic for what I was going for.

After trying to stick with the simplistic theme and keeping in with the circle theme, I added small stylized chins to the characters, and showed how they would work with different head wear. At this point I was happy with the style of the characters, and sought to get more feedback from here on.

Following more feedback, it was obvious that the circles were still too simple, and that more stylization was needed, even while attempting a more simple look. A new head shape was needed. After designing new head shapes for many hours, I landed on a more "egg" shape, with a sharper jawline that angled into the stylized chins.

Here is an example of fixing some of the tangent lines that was present in many of my designs. The hair on both the Finnish Man, and the Inuit fell too close to the eyes, I moved the hair up in order to give the shapes more space of their own. I also removed a small amount of detail on the Inuit's hood in order to make the small details more visible as an icon.

On the Bavarian man, I removed the stroke from his hat to keep in consistency with the rest of the icons. For the Islamic woman, I fixed the eye opening of her Burqa, as they are not perfectly round in the real world.

Final Design

After making small changes to many of the icons, I finished off the rest of the icons to complete the set, keeping them all in line with this new style. I think the jawline of the new head shape helps pull the overall shape of the icons together, without getting away from their simple nature. It feels like something that could be used effectively to teach culture to different people, and even though it was aimed at children, could probably be used to teach people of all ages.