Sustainability Icon System
client Allies and Morrison
completed 2023
Before, the studio left icon decisions up to individual designers, who largely relied on open-source Noun Project assets.
This meant inconsistent and sometimes overlapping symbols to mean different things.
Furthermore, the studio maintained fairly loose brand guidelines, relying on individual taste for detailed aesthetic and visualisation decision making.
Drawing from typography principles and architectural rhythms directly from the studio’s design apporach and existing branding, a modular, grid-based icon system was developed.
The system is designed to maintain equal visual balances for icons, with a need to be highly flexible to allow for complex, unusual representations.
For sustainability communication, a library of ‘base’ icons were designed, as building blocks to then generate new and contextual meanings, as is needed in sustainability communication. In this manner, the icon system can be scaled up (for data visualisation and diagramming), or scaled down (for digital documents and simpler representations) as needed.