Iconography

Iconography is the genre of graphic design that creates a simplified 2D representation of a real world object. It is like when we were kids when we drew a human as a stick figure - represented by a flat circle for the head and lines for the limbs and body. It’s the same principle applied to iconography. In Adobe Illustrator, we use Shape and Line tools to create icons.

So how does Iconography work for the IT and RAN Infrastructure. Well…. Techie people think that icons are cute… seriously. You see techie people are highly logical. They appreciate visuals but not in an extreme abstract way. By using icons, they can easily visualize abstract concepts or concrete hardware design and systems.

For example, a database is a platform that manages tables and data. But instead of representing it as a front-end, you represent it as a container represented by a cylinder with 3 partitions. As to what that partition means, I actually don’t know why. It’s been like that since the beginning of the digital age.

Another is cloud services - this is when you subscribe or rent your infrastructure instead of purchasing your server and storages. A cloud service is obviously represented by a cloud instead of a server farm.

Servers and core switches are represented by a stack of horizontal boxes with buttons on fronts. These for me are the highly used icons across IT and RAN infrastructure. So if you are a graphic designer in a technology company, make sure you always have these in your files.

The cell tower is the icon that represents many concepts. It can be a RAN infrastructure, a mobile network operator (MNO), a wide access network (WAN), backhaul links or even a neutral host. It actually depends on the network solution or sometimes depends on the SME. A network administrator may represent a cell tower as a tower but if it's an ECE designing a product for a distributed antenna system, it can simply look like a core switch.

As to which one is the right icon to pick, you will simply grow a natural intuition if you have worked with the tech people for a long time.