WyDee Icons

Back in 2022, I was working as a founding product designer at a biotech startup called Enable Medicine. It was still early days, and I wanted to help shape not just the product experience but the company’s visual language as a whole.

I’d always been fascinated by iconography, and I thought this would be a unique way I could inject a bit of personality into the product. The balance between form, function, and emotion in tiny symbols can appear so simple, yet make such a difference. So I thought, why not start by designing a few custom icons for our product and brand materials? That decision sent me down a path that, over a few years, would grow into a journey of joy, frustration, creative passion, and discovery; each moment of which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This is the story behind how I developed the WyDee icons collection.

Enable Medicine develops software and tooling, specifically for analyzing spatial biology data. This is a field of studying cells in the context of their physical location within the tissues. At the time, this was a new frontier where scientists were pushing the boundaries of precision medicine.

As the founding designer, one of my roles is to take whatever my company’s mission is and translate that into a visual language that evokes our core values.

For Enable Medicine, this could be captured in:

In order to establish a consistent theme and recurring motifs, I needed to decide what the look and feel of these icons should be. In the world of iconography, there are a multitude of ways you can differentiate your shapes from others, so I focused on making a few key decisions that would guide the library.

To build consistency across this collection, I needed to establish the visual DNA of the icons. In other words, the rules that would guide visual motifs, and make the system feel unified and intentional. In iconography, seemingly small design choices can profoundly shift visual tone, so I focused on four key variables:

• Radii rules
• Visual weight
• Fill style
• Overall approach to shape/personality

To connect visual choices to brand emotion, I used the brand terms above as direct design cues:

With the first collection of icons created, I got to work ensuring every in-app icon need was met and updated. After this, I started expanding the library proactively. I wanted to anticipate future needs instead of reacting to them. Up until this point, I’d been adding icons ad hoc, but this took time and lacked any sort of strategy to build comprehensive and scalable collection.

To begin scaling the system, I studied existing libraries like Material Icons, Coolicons, Iconic, and Untitled to benchmark pictogram coverage and expand the WyDee set accordingly.

To increase versatility, I also introduced solid counterparts for each outline icon. This was a small change that greatly expanded usability across themes and backgrounds.

These expansions and new solid style grew the library from ~300 icons to 1200+.