A library of icons for Amazon Digital Products
3D Glyphs
In the summer of 2013 a group of Amazon designers, developers, and product managers was hard at work designing a phone to try and land Amazon squarely within the mobile space. We already had some really successful tablets, but with the phone we were entering a crowded field and we needed to differentiate. The phone was equipped with face-tracking that made gestural UI possible and our leadership insisted on 3-dimensional UI components.
3D icons, 'glyphs' we called them, rendered light on a dark background
Modeling, rendering, iterating
Since I had a somewhat extensive experience with modeling I earned the task of sketching, modeling, and rendering the 3D glyphs for the phone in Cinema 4D. Together with the help of Nino Yuniardi, Steven Sommer, and Rich Mains we crafted a cohesive system and had weekly reviews to ensure that the glyphs made sense visually and would be usable for teams across the entire company.
2D glyphs for Tablets
The 3D glyphs were well-received and after the launch of the phone we wanted to establish a greater coherence across the products designed and developed within our group (Digital Products). So I set to work on the several hundred more icons we had used on tablets and redesigned them to work with the style and weight we had set from the 3D glyphs.
