Compassion Icon System
As part of Compassion’s rebrand work, I lead a global team of designers in developing an iconography system. We had 3 goals for our icons:
Human
“Glocal” (global representation, local feel)
Simple
Style exploration for Bible and Moms & Babies.
Working Groups
Global representation was one of our biggest goals with this project, so a global working group was critical. We kicked off our rebrand efforts with a gathering in Colorado Springs. We had representation from Australia, Canada, England, South Korea, New Zealand, and the US.
Workshop 1: Moodboards
Due to the tricky timezones of our working group, we tried to to meet every 2-3 weeks, with plenty of async working and communicating between. Our first workshop was focused on aligning on our goals for our iconography and collecting inspiration for moodboards.
Workshop 2: Decision Making
After developing moodboards and testing out styles on some heavily Compassion-specific imagery (i.e., Church-centered, child-focused), we created proposals around what was and wasn’t working stylistically.
Style Proposal: Smile + Mixed
The style for this direction was inspired by our brand typeface, Neighbour Sans. I also tried to integrate a human “curve” where applicable. Typically, this looks like an upward curve, like a smile, as seen on the church icon. There are also some downward curves, though, like the hill below the cross.
Both of these work to add a human element to the icons, like the shape of a human mouth when frowning or smiling.
