Friday, July 25, 2008

I Love My Job!

Being an in-house designer, I get a huge variety of design related tasks: everything from boring forms to photography to design, to a bit of Flash and everything in between. Some days, the job just rocks, though, and today was one of those days!

I was tasked with developing food allergen icons for our redesigned website. There are eight major food allergens are: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, nuts, peanuts, soy, and wheat.

I wanted something simple that would read well super small (we'd use them in print too), but would convey the meaning quickly. I wanted to use the letters if possible, as I felt that would give me the result I desired. But just doing the letters by themselves didn't seem like it would be the answer. So I did a bit of research and soon it struck me that I could use the asterisk in the icon! Asterisks are commonly associated with notes, warnings or other info.

I originally wanted to put the letter inside the icon, but that just didn't read well at all, so I ended up put them side by side. And as soon as I did that, I just knew it was the answer. My face lit up and I was giddy as little kid again. This is what design is about: finding that one simple yet elegant solution that does its job and looks awesome. Today was a perfect day for design and this is what I live for!

Feel free to share why you love your job and/or the great projects/jobs you've had where you really felt in the at the top of your game.

Here's how the icons turned out (click to view the entire image):



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