Team
Lead Designer
Icon Designer
Project Manager
Role
On this particular project, I worked with our project manager on understanding what each category was representing and lead designer on designing the metaphors for this library set.
Timeline: 1 month
Overview
In March 2020, it was announced that Excel was getting new data types for over 100 topics powered by Wolfram Alpha, including food, movies, places, chemistry, and even Pokémon. As the feature rolls out to Microsoft 365 subscribers, users will be able to type in plain text and numbers into Excel and convert them into data types.
As third party collaborators are integrated into the Microsoft 365 experience, my team is tasked to take on the new challenges that come with designing icons that can also integrate visually for a seamless workflow. One of these challenges was for a brand new icon set to represent categories of data types used in a feature in Excel.
The icons are displayed in Excel cells, the ribbon, and in special data cards that are prompted when the icon is selected from within the cell.
Challenge
The unique challenge to making these icons was that they were not office or task related metaphors. Due to the unique categories that these icons are to represent, there are few common elements that are shared with the rest of the Office iconography. I additionally had to find ways to clearly distinguish between similar metaphors such as "planet" and "outer space."
Approach
I took more creative liberties to designate the symbols representing each category however I did design within our guidelines in order to make this set look like they were part of the Microsoft 365 icon library. I used the same padding, stroke, and cutout guidance to produce the scale of icons. Since the smallest size requested for this icon set was 14x14, I simplified detailed concepts and visual complexities to a few lines and shapes.
Source: Venture Beat