this was the first project i worked on for nascent form and my first commercial graphical project since leaving university. the project was the creation of a photo browsing application for japanese technology company kyocera.

the brief was to produce the entire set of icons used on the user interface [UI] which had to give the impression of 3D and be clear to a foreign audience. the navigational device was based upon the navisphere™ model which simulates a three dimensional spherical structure.

i used 3D studio max to construct and light the models to be rendered out, and then tweaked in photoshop.

we felt the results where particularly successful. the clients appeared to be delighted with the final results and the finer details of the interface, they particularly enjoyed the dog in 'the family' icon! :)

these demo interfaces were created to illustrate the use of nascent form's widget set - part of the LUiSA™ framework

these particular screen show how that standard input methods could be skinned and even animated if desired to appear and interact very different to each other.

these screens show the three different styles created for the demo.

here are the kyocera icons in the context of the user interface. as you can see there is little and often no text used on the interface. we relied a lot on the legibility of the icons to be understood by the japanese audience.

fortunately we managed to get it right first time and the first batch was accepted and signed off by the client! Success! :D

working on a small form factor in order to utilise the maximum amount of screen space on the mobile phone, these icons needed to be pixel pushed, photoshop was drafted in for this task.

it was the requirements for this particular icon set which spurred me on to investigate the appropriate use of image as a language tool.

the complex operations that were required to be legible in such a small format became quite a challenge. a challenge i certainly enjoyed!

the result was a neat set of tightly styled and functional icons which worked particularly well on the interface they were designed for.