Overview
Panasonic Avionics Corporation is a subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation that designs, engineers, manufactures, sells, and installs customized in-flight entertainment and communications solutions to airlines worldwide.
To support the solutions sold to their airline customers, Panasonic provides a CMS website which is used to pull and update information from the features the airlines have across their fleet. The CMS website is integral to internal, customer, as well as third party partner usage as it has the power to generate software packages that can be immediately loaded on an airplane; it allows airlines as well as their respective liaisons at Panasonic to manage, test, update, and ship most if not all of their in-flight entertainment and communication features. Some of the features include but are not limited to a site builder, passenger usage data, flight data, and inflight shopping.
The CMS website as a whole underwent a UI refresh in 2016 and as new features and requests were demanded, icons were needed to match the new UI and to improve navigation so that users have a visual reference of the features they had access
Challenges
Panasonic Avionics did not have a company wide design system for the internal tools that were developed by different engineering teams. I would have to create the icons from scratch and expand on what is in the marketing brand guidelines which is limited on colors and logo usage.
Approach
I established the guidelines for which I used to create the icon set. Using common elements and a maximum number of 4 colors, I created translated the functions of the complex modules into illustration metaphors. The palette was taken from the brand guidelines and similar shades of color were procured from or added to them to fulfill the purpose of the iconography.
The icons have high visibility as they guide the navigation for its thousands of selected users: Panasonic employees, their third party vendors, as well as the airline associates that manage the content and data across airline fleets.
