…Icon set you’ve discovered!

So just like last week, I wanted to break down another icon set. Once again, Facebook (and Lucasfilm, LTD.) provided a fantastic set to analyze. So I am just going to dive right in!

The Icon Set

This icon set are part of Facebook Messenger’s sticker collection. They are fun and more complex emojis, with some dynamic and some static collections. Over the past four years, when a major blockbuster movie hits theater, the marketing campaigns will sometimes create a sticker set to help promote their film. In this case, Lucasfilm, LTD and Facebook created a set for Star Wars; The Last Jedi.

The Common Elements

When we look at this set, the first major element that the twenty stickers are tied together by, is that each of the characters are being framed by a circle filled with a gradient. To create variation through out the set, there are a few different sized circles in the set.

One of the other rules that have been applied is that if the character is as tall as a normal human adult, or taller, then they are cropped from about the waist to mid-chest. The smaller characters, with the exception of R2-D2, are fully rendered.

The Sith

Next, there is a common background depending upon  if the character aligns themselves with the Dark Side. The background is a dark red gradient. For those that are either Light Side, or neutral in their political standing, we see that the set employs a lot of blues and purples, with a couple of yellows to help add some contrast.

Personality

One of the major traits of each of these stickers is that if the character’s face is visible, a particular style was implemented. The eyes are almost all identical, with a line being drawn through the bridge of the nose.

Exclamations and Questions

Like I said earlier, these stickers are meant to be a very complex emoji set, so for some emotions, a little punctuation was used to get the emotion across. Where it was used, there were placed in the exact same spot, and break past the circle.

Breaking out

To help create an interesting icon set, it is important to look at each icon’s silhouetted shape. If the shape is plain, you can end up with a very boring icon. To add some visual interest, each of the stickers breaks outside of that basic circle shape on average of 2-3 times. If you look at the draw-over to the right, I circled where each icon broke past the circle.

Some of my own critiques

After analyzing this amazing icon set, I noticed a few things that could be improved on. For example, when I did the “breaking out” analysis, I noticed that there were a few icons that had points where they created tangents with the circle, where they almost escape its borders, but felt content to just touch it (i.e.: C-3PO’s left arm). As for the color of the circles, when it came to the Dark side, I felt it was very well executed, where as for the others, it left a bit to be desired. The missed opportunity I think that they could have used was that the Light side could have all been shades and hues of blue, while the Neutral characters could have been purple. The two yellow stickers feels out of place with the rest of the set.

Hope you enjoyed this post! I will be posting one more time before the end of the week with some of my own icons that I have been working on for the past two weeks!