Icon Design, Motion Graphics, Visual Design

Creating Icons for Biodiversity (and Beyond)

How might a simple game teach an audience of all ages the significance of biodiversity?

From essentials like clean water, food, and medicine to recreational activities and jobs, we as human beings benefit immeasurably from biodiverse ecosystems. With a younger audience in mind, Lisa, an exhibit content developer for The Tech Interactive’s Solve for Earth, strove to develop an educational game that might be fun and instantly recognizable to everyone. The end product was the Biodiversity Game, an interactive digital experience that highlights the many ways we are connected to the environment.

Based on the card game Concentration (or Memory), the objective is to turn over pairs of matching images. And each time a player makes a match, the game offers a fun fact related to the card’s image, ranging from animals, plants, and other parts of the environment that benefit humans. To incentivize visitors to play more than one session, Lisa introduced badge collection: a successful match triggers a fun fact and an animated, colored icon replaces its greyed out counterpart. A player earns nine badges in one completed game, with the opportunity to continue playing to collect the other eleven in subsequent sessions.

The Task

I worked closely with software engineer Mike to develop the Biodiversity Game, handing off specs and assets for layout, UI components, and icons. Because of the game’s simple UI/UX design, I directed most of my efforts into illustrating and animating the badges to add delight. 

The outcome

In designing badges for the Biodiversity Game, I created a library of icons that has since been reused and adapted for other Solve for Earth projects. Currently in beta mode, we aim to gather feedback over the following months to improve this experience.

Visualizing abstract concepts

The Creative Services team at The Tech Interactive is very small, comprising just three designers including myself. This means that sometimes, we don’t have the time or resources to design custom icons where needed. However, the topics represented by the badges in the Biodiversity Game were too specific to rely on stock icons.

Some of the icon designs were intuitive, like happiness, medicine and clothing, while others required more research (what does “Future Innovation” look like?). I Googled keywords and checked the Noun Project not just for inspiration, but also to determine whether my vision of an icon already existed in the public perception of a topic. I could design a really cute birdwatching icon, but it would hardly be usable if people had never seen something comparable to it before. 

Expanding the family

The icon style that I developed for the Biodiversity Game made its way into some of the other parts of Solve for Earth. Notably, the icons that illustrate the environmental footprints of land, carbon dioxide, and water in Pick + Chews, another touch screen experience, have their roots in the Biodiversity Game’s aesthetic. Land was adapted from the Crops icon, carbon dioxide shares the same cloud shape belonging to Clean Air, and water borrows the teardrop shape of Clean Water.

In the data visualization section of Solve for Earth, the icons of a large, printed infographic about rising global temperature also share the same visual language as the Biodiversity Game and Pick + Chews. I recycled the icons for carbon dioxide, Fishing, and Cooling to illustrate thawing permafrost, declining coral reefs, and extreme heat.

Year

2019-2020

Thanks to

Lisa and Mike