Working with Samsung didn’t just allow us to collaborate with a household name — it also gave us the opportunity to pioneer design in a completely new category. After Samsung merged with Harman, they branched out into the connected car industry, and came to our team looking for iconography designs to be displayed on the car’s touch screen menu.

For this project, we drafted foundational concepts for a category that was largely uncharted in terms of visualization. Because connected cars are an entirely new phenomenon, there weren’t many preconceptions restricting our creativity. But while this autonomy was a gift, it also posed a challenge: How do you develop icons when there’s not a precedent to draw inspiration from?

With any icon, the idea is to create a tangible representation of a concept that instantly communicates its message to everyone who sees it, regardless of language. In this way, we use images as a global language that can connect the world. So we designed these icons to be approachable and simple: rounded edges, spacious designs, and representative of familiar objects that people could immediately identify.

Using these guidelines, we were able to create icons that could hold their own on the page yet still functioned perfectly as a set — providing an effortless, intuitive introduction to the connected car world.

March 2017

Role: Iconography from ideation to production