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Kodak Symbol Resource

Assignment: Design and develop an interactive database of symbols and signs used by the design team at Kodak. Created in Hypercard, the database allowed the designers to have a central repository for all the icons and symbols the Design Resource group created for use in software, on equipment and packaging. The team was finding that various designers were reinventing the same symbols over and over because there was no central repository for iconography.

Each symbol had a data card, each category had a visual and verbal index and the database was linked to blank templates for the creation of new symbols. Launched 1994.

Front page of the Database, seen when the project was launched.	Visual index of a category. Clicking a thumnail takes the user to the details page for the symbol.
Details page of a graphic symbol.	Graphic Guidelines page. This section was available from every page in the project.

Approach: Working closely with an in-house designer and project manager, I took inventory of the entire library that the group currently was using, investigated the standard ISO and IEEE collections of symbols and sketched out a rough architecture for the database.

Each symbol was assigned a semantic category which was color coded in the site. From the thumbnail overview page the user could click the thumbnail and go right to the data page for the selected symbol.

Each symbol had a detailed data page consisting of: the name of the designer, the category, the software used to create the symbol (i.e. Illustrator, Photoshop, freehand, etc.), a list of keywords and a description of the symbols use. There was also an option to open a copy of the file in the appropriate software.

The last section of the Resource included a mini-style guide for the creation and development of symbols. The resource contained a mini tutorial and set of guidelines for the creation of symbols in the department. There was a link to the symbol template from this section.

Outcome: I was originally hired to design and architect the database and do lightweight Hypercard/Hypertalk coding to implement the project. As the project progressed and the group asked for more and more features, I found I ended up coding a very robust database repository. Eventually we added network access capabilities and stored the final database on a network server. Any designer could access the database, search the symbols by keyword, designer or visually. In addition, they could add a new symbol once it was created to the central repository.