Rocky Icons

In 2021, along with the redesign of Rocky's User Interface, I was in charge of redesigning all icons used in the software. Rocky is a engineering simulation software that was, at the time, part of ESSS products and in 2023 was acquired by Ansys.

Project Observations and Constraints

• The previous icons were mostly made by the development team and had no defined style and were visually inconsistent.
• The previous icons were all in bitmap format, and therefore, in low quality and not scalable.
• The new stylesheet that would be implemented together with the icons would have a light and a dark version, while previously there was only a default light theme.
• Many features, while widespread in engineering simulation software, had no charateristic shapes associated to them that could be easily turned into icons.

Solutions

1. Color palette

2. 
   Due to the implementation of the dark and light themes, the color palette was defined with the aim of achieving a good contrast between the two types of background. For this purpose, two shades of red, green, yellow, and blue and three shades of gray were defined.

3. Style

4. 
   A minority of the icons were 24x24 pixels, while the majority were 16x16 pixels. The fill of the shapes became their biggest delimiter, while borders were used in some cases to help with contrast issues. Gradients weren't used except for a couple of exceptional cases.

5. Modifiers

6. 
   Modifiers were designed to be applied to basic icons, denoting common actions such as editing, adding, or information. Another type of modifiers were those designed for specific Rocky actions that were all correlated.