icons!

end of the line for plain ol' icons! kindly stick around to see them star in an infographic.
here they are!

as a quick refresher as to what these things have gone through, here is the backstory for one icon: the macbook.

i feel like i'm more relevant to dj culture than i ever have been before with this project, with the addition of color and the "doubletracking" color treatment of the layered outline. the simple split, while it does have a tidy nod toward the idea of remix through one inversion, lacks the iconoclastic kick of an off-registration high contrast refrain. i feel like i'm taking a risk with this new addition, and i've been speaking to jamie about how i need to do more of that. hopefully this is a risk that pays off! my studiomates dug it. 

to rehash a few formal decisions that i may have addressed earlier, i chose the round bubbly icon base because of its pertinence to current tech trends, and the importance of the digital culture alongside and tangled up in dj culture. the slice represents the taking of an established form and upending it into something unexpected that nevertheless still makes sense within or outside of the context of the original. the doubletracking outline that enhances the 2 and 3 color sets allude to the layering of remixes, the amplifying of desirable or recognizable features, and a willful offset to keep the audience constantly aware of the creator's hand in the making and remaking.

to ensure legibility, i did very much simplifying. most of my artifacts are so technologically complex, with so many buttons and sliders and dials and knobs, that it took several tries until i had reduced and distilled to the point that the meaning came through clearly without the need for a whole keyboard or all 100 faders. i left my shapes largely undistorted, rounding corners and slice/inversing, but on the whole, my objects retained their silhouettes without doing too much fracturing or melting.

as for cohesion, the biggest trick was getting the few things that weren't basically square to play nicely and occupy the same visual space as all my squares. by rounding all corners and using specific circle sizes, i think i was able to create a visual language that, when rendering objects, lends them a relatedness that they might not otherwise be able to have. i also created a rule to have a doubled outline on the bottom of every icon, to give it a sense of gravity or direction, lest they threaten to float away due to the fact that they're all depicted flat front. lastly and most blatantly, by using a sharp edged quadrilateral as an inversion box on every icon, i was able to give them each roughly the same amount of black space, and square up the icons that aren't.