During my work term as a Marketing and Communications Assistant at the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, I was asked to create an image to accompany an announcement of the dates for UBC Celebrate Learning Week 2014.

Since the event was still six months away, there were few photographs for me to use, especially since many of them had already been used for last year’s articles. So I drew an icon of a megaphone (highlighting the “announcement” aspect), incorporating the Celebrate Learning Week logo and colours.

Shortly after I completed this project, my supervisor asked if I would be interested in designing a set of icons for the department, so that there would be a library of icons for other staff members to use when creating promotional materials. The Web Development team also contributed ideas for icons that would be useful for their work.

I researched icons online and looked at some existing work done by coworkers to design my icon library in Adobe Illustrator, focussing on clean, simple, and usable designs.

I also sought to design icons that would be useful to the department, which provides UBC faculty, students, and staff with technological support and educational technology tools. I took into account that some icons, like laptops, would be used often, and drew several versions to offer some variety.