Daily UI Challenge: 005
I'm doing a Daily UI Design Challenge: designing a different screen each weekday for 100 days based on the prompt I receive in my email. Knowing very little about what sorts of prompts I'd receive, I decided to try my best to make all of my screens fit within a fictional travel-planning app, Let's Travel.
I'm also writing about some of my UX considerations along the way.
Icons are fascinating to me. The fact that such a simple, usually small image can stand in for something larger and more complex is certainly not surprising – that's basically what language is, after all – but it's still a reflection of our mind's amazing ability to make connections. Icon design is certainly not one of my core competencies, and day five's challenge, "design an app icon" was a particularly difficult one for me. I'll be honest: I'm not super happy with what I ended up with:
The main shape is a suitcase, done up in my app's brand colors (incidentally, I selected those colors by pulling a range of colors from the image my landing page, tweaking them slightly, and then saving them within Sketch as document colors – a highly scientific process). The letters are just rounded rectangles, joined together. They are meant to be sitting on top of the suitcase, so I applied a shadow to give the illusion of depth. "LT" stands for Let's Travel.
I wanted to convey the fact that this was a travel app (hence the suitcase), and also differentiate it from other travel apps that may also use a suitcase metaphor, since it's certainly not a unique one. Within the Android ecosystem, app icons are usually paired with the app's name, so it's not necessary that the icon include the name, but I do like the idea of my app's initials acting as a monogram on the luggage.
This is one challenge that I definitely want to revisit, not just to tweak as I flesh out my app, but for myself, to continue to explore icon design. How do I represent the core of what my app is in the form of a visual that will be seen every single time someone opens my app?
