i drew an icon every day

Every day in 2016, I drew an icon – based upon the events of my day. And they are all here:

365cons.com

The cat­a­lyst was in mid-Sep­tem­ber of the pre­vi­ous year. As a graph­ic de­sign­er, I had been frus­trat­ed with how a project’s SVG icons were ren­der­ing un­apolo­get­i­cal­ly blur­ry online. 

With a quick search, I learned they should ad­here to a grid, with pix­el per­fec­tion – things that dic­tat­ed align­ment, place­ment, and stroke width. 

I im­me­di­ate­ly loved the idea of jux­ta­pos­ing cre­ativ­i­ty with­in tech­ni­cal bound­aries and want­ed to learn as much as I could along the way. But every ar­ti­cle seemed to sug­gest dif­fer­ent, con­flict­ing ex­e­cu­tions and most as­sumed I had some pri­or un­der­stand­ing. I spent the next few days read­ing what felt like every sin­gle ar­ti­cle about iconog­ra­phy on the web.

(If you’re cu­ri­ous about the tech­niques, a few months lat­er I doc­u­ment­ed my process for the client here.)

Af­ter that project was com­plet­ed – fall 2015 – I de­cid­ed that I want­ed to re­al­ly em­brace the pix­el grid. And what bet­ter way than prac­tic­ing a lit­tle bit every day? 

So I com­mit­ted: I de­cid­ed to draw an icon every day for a year.

And at the time, I didn’t re­al­ly re­al­ize what I was get­ting my­self into. But my dai­ly rou­tine would in­spire each icon; this gave me some­thing to work from.

I picked a larg­er, more il­lus­tra­tive-like ap­proach (though re­tain­ing the pix­el grid) to rep­re­sent each day. Some days I drew them quick­ly – in twen­ty min­utes. Oth­er days, and prob­a­bly more of­ten, I’d spend clos­er to two or three hours. 

My mo­ti­va­tion came in waves. Most days I looked for­ward to it. I’d do it in the morn­ing with a cup of cof­fee or in the evening re­lax­ing be­fore bed. But a bunch of days in July I want­ed to rip my hair out – I still was bare­ly half done – on tired days I would tell my­self to “just make one more.”

I’ve got a lot more to learn, but now the icon grid and I feel more like bffs than strangers. 2016 will al­ways be a spe­cial year for me; it is one I will be able to lit­er­al­ly look back on.

P.S:
I’ve in­clud­ed down­load links as SVGs and PNGs on the site. I’m li­cens­ing them un­der MIT so they’re open for per­son­al use.

Ran­dom observation: 
I would say there would be about one day a month where I felt in­fe­ri­or and as if I for­got how to be a de­sign­er. This pat­tern made me re­al­ize it’s nor­mal, and maybe I’ll cut my­self some slack when these days come again.
 
 

—amy de­v­ereux

Flom­mist Amy De­v­ereux is a vi­su­al de­sign­er, brunch en­thu­si­ast, and Ox­ford com­ma ad­vo­cate. Copy­right © 2017 Amy Devereux.

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