My development team asked for a yellow circle icon to go on the online dashboard of project status. Looking at the icons already in use, I decided to spend a little extra time using my meager visual designs skills to make them a little more elegant and functional.
The solution
What's cool
Aside from a purely æsthetic objection to the clumsy clipart icons we had been using, I wanted to provide a solution that would be easy to visually scan. By using pale, hollow icons for projects on track and filled icons for projects in trouble the new set makes it much easier to spot problems. The hollow icons also help make it easy to pick out the special cases of OK projects that aren't making progress (in planning, on hold, or completed) if you're looking for them in particular. The increasingly intense coloring of the projects in trouble helps further support a gestalt sense of how things are going when looking at the whole dashboard. Sticking to the existing, adequate color code and fundamental symbols helped prevent the proposal from sparking any arguments about whether the symbols were really “right.”
Obviously, this tiny project doesn't demonstrate much in the way of visual design chops (which I don't claim to have anyway) but it does show that I can put together crisp, serviceable visual design grounded in good information design principles when the need arises.
