Same same but different different

You might have noticed on the home page of this website and the MNF Status Hub that there are a few new looking icons. Well done for noticing them. Shame on you if you didn't. The reason behind the new icons is quite simple - uniformity. No, not uniforms like you wore at school.

Uniformity - ( yoo-nuh-fawr-mi-tee ) - as dictionary.com tells me how it should be pronounced, is also a noun with a definition of

the state or quality of being uniform; overall sameness, homogeneity, or regularity: uniformity of style.

This isn't an English lesson rather an informative blog article about why we have some new icons at MNF and how they came to be.

The previous version of the Status Hub looked a bit NQR with all the system and product icons of MNF world having different shapes, sizes and colours. Now, different shapes is all well and good. We can't have every icon looking the same. That would just be silly and confusing. Different sizes are to be expected. Different colours is something we can control along with the overall style. Given some of the icons have been around for a long time without a refresh, now seems like a good time to do something about it.

Design

When looking at the icons of our systems and products in the one place, we wanted them to all look like they belong to the same family. Not in the creepy Christmas photo style.

From a uniformity (there's that word again) perspective, having all the icons look *similar* would give anyone looking at them in one place a definite impression that they belong to the same company. I'm not talking about redesigning every brand under the MNF Group umbrella, rather giving them a colour treatment and maybe a slight tweak so they look nice when sitting next to other brands in a single place.

Shapes

I'm not talking BBQ here but triangles / squares / circles like we learned about on Sesame Street when we were kids and hit the revision button when we had kids ourselves.

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You will see a mixture of abstract shapes, exisiting brands with the new styling applied and also more obvious shapes that are associated with the product name.

A brand like Pennytel is normally a bright green colour. In order to make it more uniform ( !! ), I applied the colour scheme to it and now it looks like it is part of the MNF family in the Status Hub and Developer websites.

For existing systems like Acuity, I made an 'A' out of some abstract shapes.

For new systems like Omega, our payment gateway API, I used something a little more abstract that looks like 3 credit cards stacked together.

Colour

Given that MNF is predominantly blue, stepping away from that that would be considered treason.

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Because I'm not one for lynch mobs, I thought it would be safest to go along with the corporate look and feel and use the MNF Blue as the basis for what was to come.

Gradient

At the time of writing, the current trend in design is gradients. You can't go anywhere without seeing a blend of similar shades or even contrasting colours. So, why not jump on the bandwagon.

While keeping the MNF Blue in mind, I went with a slightly lighter shade as the lighter blue colour in the gradient because I didn't want the contrast to be too large, rather more subtle than anything so it almost looked like there isn't a gradient at all. The darker blue is slightly darker than MNF Blue which I think gives us a modern colour palette and style to work with while still paying respects to our roots.

For colour nerds, I'm talking #0466C8 for the lighter blue and #023E7D for the darker blue.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Actually, it's more like the present because there's more products and systems being developed by our creative software engineers so there'll be more icons to come in the future. Did I just break the space time continuum with those last couple of sentences? Oh look, a flying Delorian just went by...