Jon Hicks is a graphic designer and illustrator who is from the UK whose work we look at quite a lot. He is best known for designing the original logo for the Firefox web browser, as well as for his work on the identity for the Mail Chimp email marketing service. Hicks has also worked with a variety of clients in the publishing, music, and technology industries. As well as his illustrative work, he is an advocate for open standards and web accessibility.
Jon Hicks is well known for his illustrations, which often feature bold colours, simple shapes and his own unique style. This can be seen through some of his past and present clients such as Canvas, DuckDuckGo, Dyson and Spotify.
When illustrating or creating icons, Jon has something he calls “a discovery phase” where he selects a small collection of icons to focus on first and looks at how he can use different approaches to alter their styles slightly as well as establish the basic such as the size, format and file naming.
The brief he was given was to create an icon style that would be simple, rounded, friendly and intuitive while still incorporating existing brand elements such as the Spotify logo and the Proxima Nova typeface that was being used for the redesign. They also looked at establishing a group of rules in which he could develop the icon set from which included 4 main sizes 16px, 24px, 32px and 64px. They were designed so as they were scaled up, the stroke widths were made thinner to stop the icons being really thick looking.
Some more illustrative work that caught my eye on his website was the health care worker illustrations. His client for this was Prevent Epidemics for the reports **Protecting Health Care Workers** and **Health Heroes: The Faces of Infection Prevention and Control.**
For the **Protecting Health Care Workers** report, Jon was tasked to visualise how healthcare workers must of felt during the pandemic, focusing in on the decline in mental health and the mental strain on them as well as the history of the well known PPE or personal protective equipment. I have to say his illustrations show both of these very clearly. Not only is the position and expression of the man amazing, I like the touch of the scribbled background which reflects his struggles and creates the feel of everything is difficult through the lines changing in all directions. In the second report he created headshots of our health heroes, illustrating them based off photographs of real people the hospitals had provided.
