apstra · Principal UI/UX · owner of the icon system
The visual language of a complex product.
A dense, expert networking product speaks in symbols. I designed and steward the icon system that gives all of it one voice, so operators parse density at a glance and every team draws from the same well.
115
Icons, one family
5
Product domains
1
Visual language
16px
Legible at
A complex product speaks in symbols. I own the dictionary.
The hard part
The hard part isn't drawing a chart.
Anyone can draw a bar chart. The real design work is iconifying the abstractions: a rate of change over time, a headroom calculation between two nodes, where broadcast traffic floods an overlay. Each is a networking-analytics concept reduced to a single legible glyph an operator learns once and recognizes forever.
Node to Node Headroom
Spare capacity between two devices.
VxLAN Floodlist
Where broadcast traffic floods an overlay.
Periodic Rate
Rate of change, sampled over time.
Oversubscription
Demand against available bandwidth.
Set Comparison
Diffing two sets of telemetry.
Time in State
How long something held a condition.
A system, not a set
One grid. One stroke. One metaphor language.
- A consistent grid, stroke weight, and terminal logic so every mark reads as one family
- Organized by product area, so the system maps to how the product is actually used
- Versioned and maintained as the product evolves — a living system with a history, not a one-off drop
- Extended into HPE's AI-data-center direction, carrying the language to the newest frontier
The artifact · live
Browse the whole system.
The team-facing icon library, exactly as it ships. Search, filter by domain, and switch light and dark. It's really running.
Five domains
From the navbar to the AI data center.
The product's top-level wayfinding — Datacenter, Topology, Freeform, Blueprints, Devices, Analytics.
The day-to-day of running a fabric — anomalies, root causes, commit checks, time voyager, configlets, diffs.
The intent-based-analytics vocabulary — the deepest, most abstract set, and the one that proves domain fluency.
The data-viz vocabulary — donut, sunburst, heat map, box plot, line. The same language as the dashboards themselves.
The newest frontier — Total GPUs, GPUs Per Server, NIC Speed, Oversubscription. The set reaches into the AI data center.
One language across surfaces
The icons and the interfaces are one system.
The Charts set (donut, sunburst, heat map, line) is the exact data-viz vocabulary the product's dashboards are built from. The iconography isn't decoration applied on top of the product; it's the same visual language, end to end.
Need a visual system that scales?
Design systems, iconography, and the visual language for complex, technical products.