'Tis the Season for Holiday Icons (+ a gift!)
When I first launched the Visual Strategy Masterclass back in September, I learned many things, but there are two that particularly stood out to me:
The custom icons we developed for the course were a total hit.
The course was being used to develop visual strategies of all kinds — taking the content way beyond the intended use of brand photos, and pleasantly surprising me as a result.
Fast forward to the present, and the fact that somehow it’s already December and the holidays are in full swing.
Realizing that I had yet to develop any holiday-specific content, I thought "Hey, I have a course for that..." and turned to the Visual Strategy Masterclass to walk through the process of developing some visuals for this holiday season.
We’ve started using custom icons quite a bit as part of our content strategy at Studio Bicyclette (#iconobsessed), so I wanted to test out my process from the the Visual Strategy Masterclass to see if we could use it in the same way that we do for our brand photos.
So with the overarching theme of “holiday” and the only qualifier being that I didn’t want them to feel too generic, my little team and I walked through the process of pulling inspiration, identifying tone words and defining our visual strategy, finally leading us to come up with a list of ideas for a mini collection of icons that fit with the holiday spirit we wanted to capture.
As we went through the process, a few holiday themes emerged that we wanted to capture:
All Things Sparkly — The snowflake/starburst
Winter Wonderland — The pom pom toque
Celebration — The champagne flutes
New Year's Wishes — The clock
The Season of Giving — The gift (adorned with a bow, of course)
Based on these five themes and icons, we developed this simple holiday set, using the stars to tie them all together and customize them a little further with an extra dash of sparkle, in true Bicyclette style.
I then took it one step further and started to play around with a few ideas of how we might use the icons this season, from background patterns to social media graphics to product features and gift guides:
