Before jumping into the youshow with my first crack at an ‘icon story’ assignment or, “Describe Yourself in Four Icons #ysdaily14“, I watched this video.
Make a four icon collage of symbols or icons that describe you or your interests. Try to find ones that are graphically uniform in design – the ones above are from the Noun Project. Share a link to your image (can be uploaded to twitter or on your blog, the latter is better because you can give attribution).
I’ve admired this kind of assignment from afar as it appeared on the Dog as Five Card Flickr, and later on DS106 as ‘One Story / Four Icons‘. I like the latest incarnation with a focus on self reflection, which can be the most powerful (and challenging) source of inspiration when doing visual work. So without further ado,
Myself in Four icons
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What was my inspiration and process? Check it out… To begin, I wanted to use a dynamic font set I’ve been exploiting for awhile from Font-Awesome. They produce gorgeous and responsive icons that can be easily incorporated into any website. I’m very excited about their new project FONTICONS, which is currently in beta, but promises to bring big things to the icon world. Setting up Font Awesome gave me an excuse to create a child theme for my site and get into the <head> section. I used the judo solution for maximum impact of course!
To get some potential use out of these icons, I experimented matching them to the four categories I use on this site. Kind of fit perfectly actually, and it gives me a chance to demonstrate the versatility of Font-Awesome. Here, my menu links could look thusly [ Mixing, Growing, Making, Updates ] which I think is sweet! Finally I added a bit of color and formatting just to arrange them on the page in a central column. Color plays a crucial role in iconography but can always be a bit of a challenge for me as I have a slight color deficiency. I find something like the HTML Color Picker to be helpful for a quick selection of web color codes.
This was a great assignment, looking forward to do a couple more visual ones before I move onto audio.