Splunk's documentation team needed an improved collection of icons to help communicate the functionality and value of their product. Given the sophistication of concepts behind their software platform, this is not a simple task. We worked with Splunk to create 130 icons that covered subjects as basic as a folder to concepts complex enough to take paragraphs to describe.
The Splunk platform is deep and caters to a technical audience. Many subjects that needed to be communicated were abstract and would not translate to a basic metaphor. This created an opportunity to design a symbolic language for Splunk's core features. This process was highly collaborative with Splunk's documentation team. Iterations on icon designs would be provided throughout the day with non-stop discussion. Many icons would go through 20-30 iterations before the final design was agreed upon.
The icons needed to work at a wide range of sizes and due to their level of detail needed to retain optimal sharpness. In order to achieve those goals, all icons were designed on a grid system which alleviated typical anti-aliasing when scaling an icon up or down. Every vector point for every icon was set with intention and to-the-thousandth-of-the-pixel accuracy. This resulted in crisp icons at all size ranges.
When the icons were complete, we helped create guidelines for their optimal application. We again worked closely with the Splunk documentation team to create a style guide that addressed the team's needs and provided structure without tying their hands. We believe that a style guide should provide suggestions but ultimately trust the team's best judgment. To that end our style guide provided suggestions, best practices and ranges of choices but made it clear that an individual's best judgment is most important.
