CA Technologies (now Broadcom) has created more than 200 products over its 40 year history. CA Technologies has various software products that can be categorized as agile planning, API management, security and many others. Some of products have come from acquisitions, or investments and developments from internal accelerator projects. Because of the nature of CA Technologies’ products, it’s hard to keep consistent and branded. Most of products use a shorten version of the product name, such as PPM for Project Portfolio Management and DOI for Digital Operational Intelligence. It’s hard to recognize it’s identity by its name. Now our design system team’s propose is to use branded product icons, I was in charge of designing each product icons and creating guidelines for future use.
In the beginning, I picked 3 or 4 products to start with. I researched and interviewed product designers from the products, and narrowed down the concept. Extracting a few keywords from its product was the hardest part, because many of the products have similar features and all the functions were very conceptual. I tried to create the product icons as unique as possible so they don’t overlap with the concepts.
Below are the final concepts for CA Technologies’ major products.
I also documented the style guidelines to educate other product designers about its concept and style. I keep the grid system the same as the utility icon style guidelines. I used primary and secondary colors to give more variety in the visual design. Each product icon sits on two different themes, one is the light theme and the other one is mid/dark theme. Theming is one of the major features in our design system, so I made sure the product icons visually harmonized well in different theme colors.
I added dimensions and transparent layers to give more details than utility icons. As you can see from the below examples, some of the product icons contained more depth and hierarchies.
All those product icons are presented as concepts, the next step is to gather the feedback from stakeholders on each product team and evaluate the first concepts.
This project helped me to understand CA Technologies’ products and stylizing the product icons was a great opportunity to explore how to symbolize complex software products.