WoltLab – Community Icons 2 (2010)

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Community Icons 2

Vector Icon Set for WoltLab GmbH (October 2010 – Spring 2012)

The second official set of special icons for the large software ecosystem and marketing of WoltLab GmbH (Berlin/Germany). I started working on this completely redesigned vector icon set first for myself as a "proof of concept" in October 2010. In spring 2011 the real implementation started, simultaneously with the work on the new discussion forum software WoltLab Burning Board 4.

The icon set was intended to replace the pixel icon set I created in 2007 for the previous discussion forum software WoltLab Burning Board 3. The new technical possibilities of Web 2.0, CSS 3 and HTML 5 as well as the then finally extensive browser support of SVG graphics allowed incredible new possibilities for icons. Naturally, we wanted to take advantage of this in our latest software.

The new SVG icons would significantly reduce the footprint of the icon set supplied with WoltLab Burning Board and still allow any size without requiring 9 resolutions of each icon, as in the old icon set. Vector icons are displayed razor-sharp at any size and even allow animations, coloring through CSS and dynamic effects through Javascript. All this would mean an extreme upgrade of the internal style editor of WoltLab Burning Board.

The new icon set was planned as a flat design, without any skeuomorphism and completely reduced. At the beginning, I had carried out tests with much more elaborate and partly three-dimensional icons. But it soon turned out that the flat design would make the software look much more modern and give us a unique selling point among all other forum software, which continued to use pixel graphics and often didn't even have a uniform icon set.

My work on the icon set continued until spring 2012. At this point I had created about 300 symbols, not all of which were actually used. Later versions of WoltLab Burning Board then relied on ready-made framework icons from Font Awesome, making the self-built SVG icons obsolete.