VISUAL DESIGN | ILLUSTRATION | AUTOMATION
Visual design for CAD software and creativity
Background
In order to ensure that SOLIDWORKS, Dassault Systèmes’ (DS) industry-standard CAD software, remained consistent with brand standards and visually appealing amongst a sea of competitors, DS launched an initiative to refresh and redesign thousands of icons across the platform user interface. I joined DS for a year as a visual designer to alleviate the design team by leading this effort.
Once I built trust with the other members of the design team, I was invited to contribute to another DS initiative called Apps for Kids, a prototype creativity tool to encourage children to explore 3D modeling, art, and engineering.
Designs
Using both Photoshop and Illustrator, I produced new SOLIDWORKS icons (and redesigned many existing icons) to (1) meet the latest DS design standards for both “light mode” and “dark mode” and (2) satisfy multiple screen resolutions by providing multiple sizes for rasterized images and, when applicable, scalable SVG images.
Apps for Kids required a variety of fun, cartoony background images upon which users can position their 3D creations. The platform also needed profile avatars and other assets; I partnered with the Apps for Kids design lead to produce a multitude of these assets, including background images, with a reasonably consistent visual style.
Small sample of SOLIDWORKS icons that I had created.
My Apps for Kids forest background, complete with log bridge.
My Apps for Kids urban background, inspired by my love of city-building video games.
My Apps for Kids alien planet background, cratered and otherworldly.
My Apps for Kids meadow background, reminding me that trees are tricky to draw.
Challenges and offboarding
While learning the ropes of designing (and redesigning) icons, I figured out a handful of methods to automate certain design processes and improve my output—for instance, I wrote basic scripts in Photoshop and Illustrator to create “dark mode” variations of icons in order to reduce the time it would take to design such variations manually. I also designed a variety of tiny 16px icon thumbnails, often soliciting feedback from teammates to ensure readability at such a small size.
As I neared the end of my contract with DS, there remained many more SOLIDWORKS icons to refresh in order to fulfill the company’s design initiative. I wanted to leave the design team with resources to help them pick up my work without having to relearn my methods and shortcuts, so I assembled an “asset pack” with my scripts and instructions to allow other designers to better automate their processes.