Identifying brands that do this part of design well can be difficult. There are many impactful brands out there, but ensuring their detail-oriented branding makes it all the way to the icons isn't common. Some companies I took a look at were in the travel space, some are considered design leaders, some were both. Below are my quick notes about some of the inspiration I found (from Q1 2018).

We didn't retain many of the old details in the new set. In essence, we threw out everything and started over. This presented us with a great opportunity as well as a great challenge. To tackle a set of over 220 icons, we came together to discuss what kind of character we wanted them to have. There are various ways to approach a challenge like this, and simply saying “Professional” or “Friendly” wasn’t quite enough.

Icon design is a great example of thinking systematically. For a set of 200 icons to feel like a cohesive family, they need to have consistent characteristics and similarities carried throughout each one. With the new icon set, we have 3-4 consistent design treatments that became visual rules to shape their actual design. As we got further into designing the set, it was natural for exceptions to these rules to pop up, and in those cases, we considered each exception within the context of the whole family. 

We carefully considered attributes such as line weight, border radius and negative space in each glyph, as well as a few unique design treatments that carried across a handful of icons to make them ours.

After months of design review, hundreds of iterations, and countless examples of icon groups displayed in context, we landed on a finalized set that we were excited to use. There were many steps following our excitement, including mapping, implementation, and bringing all of our platforms onto the same page.