Design an ICON. Assignment and more information.

For Sept 12 your assignments are linked at the SEPT 12 tab above. 
Below is information about designing icons. 

Icons are simplified representations - or pictographs - of objects and phenomena that work symbolically, as signs of things. They direct attention to the thing they are representing but they are not that thing. 

Icons represent ideas; think of the heart shape and its popular way to type it as an emoticon: <3.


THREE ICONS

• Only black and white. 
• Other people must be able to understand what your icon stands for. 
• Start on paper - Having various versions good and bad versions, even "mistakes"- which often leads to better designs. 
• Use basic shapes and the Pathfinder tool 

Assigned - Three icons

1. An icon for something you use or encounter everyday. It can be on ordinary thing (school, toothbrush, shoes), or you can combine two or three signs (heart + school) to make an icon of a more complicated idea (I love school) that is part of your everyday life.

2. Something you wish to protect (children, your room,  your heart,  your health, a panda bear). Make a pictograph of what you want to protect, or you can try to show "protection in some way." 

3. Something you dislike or hate, don't want, wish didn't exist, or find uncomfortable.  (war, hate, clowns, country music). 

• Same issues as in #2: make an image of the subject. 
• Or use the standard NO sign  combined with an icon of your own design. 

MORE IDEAS CAN BE FOUND AT THESE LINKS HERE HERE 

Due in class- Tuesday. 
It might be hard to figure out some bits so we will finish in class if necessary and evaluate at the end of the session. Bring in:

• initial sketches on paper. 
• Second sketches in which you try to reduce your images into basic shapes. 
• As much as you can with shapes made with Illustrator

LINKED is a review of how to use the Pathfinder to join shapes

Read more about icons below.

Initially icons were small replica paintings of saints, usually seen in churches, but later as in people's homes after the mass production of images became possible. They directed people's attention to devotion and memories to the values or stories each of these saints represented. Many people still wear icons of saints on neck chains.

Icons can look like the object they represent, but not necessarily. The stop sign has an iconic shape, which means we recognize it, but this shape was arbitrary. It could have been another shape. The important point is it catches our attention and we agree on what it means, and hopefully act, ie. "Stop!"

Icons also might indicate something partially, leaving imagination to fill in the rest by caricaturing a characteristic of the phenomena or object being represented. Here is a standard sign for electrical danger. Just as we need to learn to understand words, we learn to "read" this representation of a volt as "electrical danger"- or "Watch out! you might get a shock!". This image of a spark indicates only a small part of a whole, which might be an electrical system or an ungrounded wire. And a spark doesn't necessarily look like that- the icon is a reduced and simplified version.

Like language, metaphoric  icons, or icons that only show a part of a whole (also called a synechdoche), or arbitrary signs like the stop sign or the European do-not-enter sign are mainly effective because we agree on what they mean.

In computing  icons are commonly used in the visual interface that direct us to use and understand the computer as if it was an analog office. In this case, the icon "desktop" and the screen we work on are actually metaphors for the physical desktop people work on in an office, even before computing. 

Thus: the icon operates as a sign that orders our world and directs attention. 

They can be designed in many different ways.

What are the icons below about?

These negotiate positive and negative space to create additional meaning.