Visual design for creativity apps

Designing for the engineers of today — and tomorrow

Title

Visual design for creativity apps

Visual design for creativity apps

Industry

Computer-aided design

Computer-aided design

Date

2015 - 2016

2015 - 2016

Team size

5 - 7

5 - 7

Role

Visual Designer

Visual Designer

Skills

Visual Design, Illustration, Design Systems

Visual Design, Illustration,
Design Systems

Tools

Photoshop, Illustrator, SVN

Photoshop, Illustrator, SVN

SOLIDWORKS Apps for Kids won the Editor’s Choice
Award at 2017 NYC Maker Faire

it continues to be used by parents, educators, and
non-profit organizations to empower youth in STEM

SOLIDWORKS Apps for Kids won the Editor’s Choice
Award at 2017 NYC Maker Faire

it continues to be used by parents, educators, and
non-profit organizations to empower youth in STEM

Results

Not only is the SOLIDWORKS platform better equipped with modern aesthetics and accessibility, but future SOLIDWORKS designers are now able to pick up and continue icon design work with ease.

SOLIDWORKS' Apps for Kids won the Editor’s Choice Award at 2017 NYC Maker Faire, and it continues to be used by parents, educators, and non-profit organizations to empower youth in STEM.

Parents, do not deprive yourself of the opportunity to create something magical and fun with your child. Work together to create a robot army, an enchanted land, or a space adventure!

– Meredith Anderson, Momgineer

Parents, do not deprive yourself of the opportunity to create something magical and fun with your child. Work together to create a robot army, an enchanted land, or a space adventure!

– Meredith Anderson, Momgineer

Situation

In order to ensure that SOLIDWORKS, Dassault Systèmes’ (DS) industry-standard CAD software, remained consistent with brand standards and visually appealing amongst a sea of competitors, DS launched an initiative to refresh and redesign icons across the platform user interface. I joined DS for a one-year contract as a visual designer to alleviate the design team by leading this effort.

Once I built trust with the other members of the design team, I was invited to contribute to another DS initiative called Apps for Kids, a 3D prototype creativity tool designed to encourage children to explore 3D modeling, art, and engineering.

Fidelity's Wealthscape platform for institutional investors (e.g., financial advisors) is missing a key options trading capability: the ability to trade multi-leg options* (MLOs).

It is very difficult for Wealthscape users to execute complex options trades with the existing trading tool; the successful design and development of a MLO-enabled trading tool represents a potential new revenue stream for Fidelity.

Design: SOLIDWORKS icons

Using both Photoshop and Illustrator, I produced thousands of SOLIDWORKS icons — both new and redesigned — while following a strict set of requirements:

  1. Meet the latest DS design standards for both “light mode” and “dark mode”

  2. Satisfy multiple screen resolutions by providing multiple sizes for rasterized images and, when applicable, scalable SVG images

I also designed a variety of tiny 16px icon thumbnails, often soliciting feedback from teammates to ensure readability at such a small size.

Design: Apps for Kids

Apps for Kids required a variety of fun, cartoony background images upon which users can position their 3D creations. The platform also needed profile avatars and other assets; I partnered with the Apps for Kids design lead to produce a multitude of these assets with a reasonably consistent visual style.

Offboarding

While learning the ropes of designing (and redesigning) icons, I figured out a handful of methods to automate certain design processes and improve my output—for instance, I wrote basic scripts in Photoshop and Illustrator to create “dark mode” variations of icons in order to reduce the time it would take to design such variations manually.

As I neared the end of my contract with DS, there remained many more SOLIDWORKS icons to refresh in order to fulfill the company’s design initiative. I wanted to leave the design team with resources to help them pick up my work without having to relearn my methods and shortcuts, so I assembled an asset pack with my scripts and instructions to allow other designers to better automate their processes.

Image by vectorjuice on Freepik

Selected projects that reflect my approach to design, teamwork, and product development.

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See all case studies

See case studies

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