Illustration

October 2022

Created on Adobe Illustrator.

Pathfinder Tool

Choose 3 animals from the Yorkshire Wildlife Park website and make animal icons for them.

1. Produce correct visual materials for the brief.
2. Understand the tools and software relevant to Graphic Design.
3. Evidence creative skills.
4. Demonstrate use of theory taught in lectures to produce suitable work.

I had a browse of the Yorkshire Wildlife Park’s animals and chose my three favourites: polar bear, red panda and lechwe. I researched examples of existing animal icons and some influenced my approach for designing the bear and red panda.

I also looked for features that made the animals uniform such as use of eye shape staying consistent across animals and simple things such as size. This is important especially working with different sized animals as the red panda in real life is much smaller than a polar bear.

I was also inspired by examples shown of past student's work in the support sessions for some features such as adding light inflections on the eyes to make animated objects come to life more.

I used the pathfinder tool to join the shapes and cut parts out if I needed to such as fur detailing on the red panda.

Rather than just have the animal icons with no background I decided to add a circle so they wouldn’t just look like a floating head. I experimented with a radius gradient on these circles.

I really liked how this little weekly task turned out especially because it was one of the first things I did on my degree, it helped to come to grips with Adobe Illustrator and learn skills I use all the time now.