Icon Design for Banana Republic

We come back from break to do an exercise in icon design. The premise is that main navigation categories on the Banana Republic website is being swapped out with icons. And off we go.

I created hand drawn sketches of the options and created a formal survey requesting rankings of first impression / visual appeal, clarity of meaning of each icon, and overall success of communicating the intended meaning (after those being surveyed took a stab at identifying each icon of each option first).

As with all design, not every option is good, so much hilarity ensued on some of the more ambiguous icon designs.

It was unanimously voted by those surveyed that Option C was the way to go.

So Option C is the concept that got graphically designed out. I did some general surveying on Facebook on how well these icons work, and they communicated what they needed to quite well, so I was happy that it worked out. :)