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temporallobetoday at 1:31 AM5 repliesview on HN

I spent half a year designing and creating 200+ icons for a custom geospatial mapping app. I really enjoyed the work but it was grueling and tedious, especially the design part. Too many people had too many different opinions on which symbols meant what, which styles clearly conveyed ideas without being too detailed, and many other things that kept wasting my time and causing a lot of rework and inconsistencies. It was literally just me doing the work, so I stopped trying to get consensus and took a few weeks to redesign the entire set and even used color science to inform my design decisions. I created the entire set without external input, then presented it. Sure there was some tweaking here and there, but I believe it turned about to be great and no one really complained in the end. The most important part was that end-users were happy. I used Inkscape and developed a set of scripts to automate the build and had everything in a very organized Git repo.


Replies

nine_ktoday at 2:18 AM

> no one really complained

They were happy that someone finally made a decision, and freed them from the burden of fruitless repeated deliberation.

show 1 reply
card_zerotoday at 2:26 AM

Possibly the half year of annoyance helped inform the weeks of opinionated inspiration.

BTBurketoday at 1:54 AM

I’d be interested in seeing those if you’re open to sharing.

spiderfarmertoday at 9:40 AM

This is one of the many reasons I do my own projects. I do value the opinion of people without knowledge and experience, but I don’t want to feel obligated to make them feel I did what they wanted.

chrisweeklytoday at 4:47 AM

can you share the icons? curious to see the finished product