The first project of this semester for IXD104 is Project 01 is to design an app based around travel with an emphasis on illustration, icons, diagrams and charts.

Since icons are such an important and essential part of any app, and it is one of the emphases of this project; we were asked to do a master-apprentice exercise on icons in order to learn the necessary skill needed for this project.

For this master-apprentice excise, we were given a choice between 2 sets of icons, I chose the following set to recreate;

I love how clean this set of icons is, yet it is still able to stand out from the page and be eye-catching.

The next thing I have to decide is what tools I want to use in order to recreate the icons - Illustautor or Figma. At the moment I'm definitely more familiar with Figma, the most I have done in illustrator is adding a line of text or changing the background colour. However, even in Figma, I'm not familiar with creating complex shapes with curves. So far my work in Figma has been posters from last semester, composed of mostly simple squares/circles and typography.

Upon further inspection of the icons set, even though the icons themselves are very minimalistic looking, there are defiantly more complex shapes that require smooth bending of shapes and lines, and I have no idea how to recreate them;

In the end, I found that with either Figma it Illustrator, I'm not going to find an easy way out. With either tool, there will be a lot that I have to learn in order to accurately recreate the icons. Thus I decided to start with Illustrator, because it is the industry standard tool when it comes to creating vectors and icons, and I will eventually need to know how to use it properly.

I started with the easier icons, the ones that I can see myself easily recreating with just common shapes such as circles and squares. The design process for these easier icons consisted of my spotting what simple shapes are in each layer, and then recreating these shapes and laying them on top of each other;

Next, I learned 2 important things in illustrator. The first is how to manipulate shapes such as dragging on specific corners to make a spear shape from a square (in orange). The next thing I learned is how to round specific corners of the square so that only one side is curved ( purple cap);

Having learnt how to manipulate shapes and concerns, I was able to do the next two icons as well;

The flame of the lighter took quite a well for me to figure out how to bend it from a circle, but I got there in the end after many trials and errors;

The next thing I had to learn was how to bend a straight line. For that, I learned to use the curvature tool and after a few attempts successfully created a somewhat smooth looking bend from a straight line;