Icons

Project Description

Release date: 2021
Role: UI Designer

Any graphical user interface you encounter today has icons. This also applies to the automotive industry that has switched from analog to digital clusters and infotainments. The new MAN TGX is MAN's first truck with a fully digital cluster and infotainment, and for this project, both hardware and software icons were created for the new cluster and infotainment.

The Challenge

Creating a new set of high-quality icons requires a thoughtful approach. With icons used in the automotive world, you work with icons that are not always intuitive because they are domain-specific, and drivers learn them over time or refer to the user manual to find out what they mean. Many of these icons are also ISO specific which means that you can not change their design much as it is a defined standard.

These icons also quickly get very complex in their design as some of the automotive features are very abstract and need a lot of elements to explain the feature or issue at hand.
Another thing that we had to deal with was the readability of the icons sets of the various features, as some of them were both present in the cluster display and infotainment but at different sizes due to the screen size and layout. The visual balance in each of the icons needed to be compared to the rest so that there was no imbalance when multiple icons were placed next to each other or when the user would switch between screens.

One of the significant challenges we encountered was the consistency with the design style of the icon sets. As there are many parts to the system, creating an overreaching icon set to satisfy all aspects is very difficult. Some system elements, such as traffic navigation or vehicle restrictions, require color to make them more uncomplicated and faster to understand, breaking the style and design guide of other parts of the system.

Another big concern that plays a role in another project I worked on arrived initially because of this one. And that is regarding the organization and documentation of all of the icons. Before I was involved in the project, this was not prioritized as necessary, but it quickly became apparent that down the road, it was hard to keep track of design decisions regarding the icons and when to use which size.

The Process

The processes at MAN are, to say the least, interesting. In big companies, the work process is sometimes unique to that specific company. For the icons' creation, the icons' metaphors were delivered to us from a separate department, where we then translated that metaphor into an icon. Depending on the complexity or the abstraction of the icon, we ideated on the representation of that metaphor. We made various variations that were then discussed and compared to the other icons in the set. The finished icons all had to be pixel perfect as they would then be exported in PNG and delivered to the software team.

The Result

What we ended up with was around ~600+ unique icons. These icons would then appear in different sizes and colors, which increased the number of finished icons to ~6000 across all the other platforms systems (Cluster, Infotainment, and Internal Remote Control).

While many things could have been improved throughout the project, the resulting icon set is now implemented in the MAN TGX 2021 truck.