Compliance Icon System
One of the foundational projects Broadcat was creating a 96-item system of pictographic icons for in-house teams at global companies to use in their compliance and ethics training materials. Our goal was to provide compliance professionals with a visual language that could be used across companies, industries, and languages, making it easier for employees to understand how to do the right thing at work.
Copyright Broadcat. Used with permission.
It was an ambitious goal, and our team encountered challenges that we were able to overcome by defining our goals and setting constraints early on. Frequent communication and testing were invaluable, as our small team drilled down the meaning of each concept we were representing to establish a holistic and unique system.
Defining a concept
Because these icons were meant to be pictographic and not purely editorial, wanted to make them work both independently and together.
For example, a very common focus for large companies is preventing bribery. Because of that, much of their anti bribery training focuses on showing employees how to identify government officials in their day-to-day work, and what kinds of interactions are allowed to prevent inappropriate giving.
So some icons needed to represent different types of government officials and government entities, to help people clearly understand the rules and recall them in real-life scenarios. We started with the most abstract of these concepts—a government entity. We pulled inspiration from historical landmarks that utilized columns to signal power and status, and created a simple and neutral, yet recognizable icon for a government.
From there, we simplified it into a single-color icon, and used it in combination with our other icons to build on the meaning. We combined the single-color version of government with our icon for company to represent a government-owned company. We also used the government icon in our government official and third party icons, and followed a similar style for other government related icons.
Establishing a style
Another challenge was to harness the individual styles of 3 designers at a young company and establish a cohesive illustrative style that hadn’t yet been utilized in the compliance industry.
Our overall goal was to get our customers’ employees all around the world to interpret, and ultimately implement these concepts in their work. We followed a very similar approach to Broadcat’s writing, which tries to bridge the gap between differences in culture, ability, and language by paring things down to its simplest form without losing meaning.
We agreed on key visual constraints inspired by kawaii and Disney’s 12 animation principles, which were successful in eliciting delight among varying audiences.
Copyright Broadcat.
Used with permission.
Soft, rounded shapes instead of rigid lines and corners represent the organic shapes we're familiar with from everyday life (apart from a piece of paper or computer screen).
Copyright Broadcat.
Used with permission.
Analog references and exaggeration elicit emotions like nostalgia and surprise.
Copyright Broadcat.
Used with permission.
Anticipation and movement depicted by staging inspire action, which also aligns with our writing style.
Defining the styling also involved a lot of conversations about things like border radius, stroke width, and tangents. We also got very philosophical about colors and curves, which the aquarius in me loved.
This phase required a lot of testing. To keep things on track, we learned to excel at zooming in to focus on tiny details and out to see the big picture, and then back in again—often. One way we did this was to print out all the icons in progress at thumbnail sizes and spread them out on a table. This helped us organize into groups by concept, style, and easily point out differences that we needed to address.
Looking ahead
And, because we started this with an expansive goal in mind, we didn’t define a scope for the number of icons that would be in this system. This meant that every new icon we added could present us with a new problem, which required a conversation about whether the constraints we had originally set still worked, or needed to be expanded.
One of the ways we planned for a growing system was by working with subject-matter-experts. We tested them in a custom training module we were developing for one of our clients to see how they worked in context, and incorporated their feedback.
We also clearly defined meanings for each icon, to prevent conflating meanings whenever we added a new team member, or a new icon. Since then, we’ve added over 25 more icons to the set, and they continue to work together as our product line has grown from 100 to over 700 training materials.
