Superpacks. Drones. Gerrymandering. Dark Money. How do you quickly illustrate these concepts in a way that is meaningful and impactful to an audience of different education levels and cultural backgrounds? That was the challenge set out before a group of 60 volunteers at anIconathon The Noun Project hosted at The New York Times back in February. Journalists, editors, graphic designers, web developers and engaged citizens brainstormed and sketched ideas for icons frequently needed throughout news editorials and applications. The goal of creating these symbols is to help guide readers through the in-depth stories investigative journalists help uncover, to provide a graphical shorthand that helps navigate readers through complicated concepts, as well as to help illustrate infographics that help people better understand important facts and correlations.
The final set of 22 Investigative Journalism symbols are now included in the Iconathon suite and available for anyone to use as public domain. We’d like to thank all the attendees who participated in the Iconathon,The New York Times for hosting us in their space, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews for sponsoring, and ProPublica and Hacks/Hackers NYCfor being vital partners in organizing this event.
In October we teamed up with the American Red Cross in Washington D.C. to host an Iconathon around the idea of urban disaster preparedness. We are happy to announce the concepts generated at the event have been successfully turned into symbols, and are now available for download in the Iconathon Collection.
It was sobering to think of all the use cases while designing these symbols. Living in California, the symbol for Earthquake was particularly relevant to us. The group at the Iconathon thought the best way to communicate this concept was to show the earth cracking, and this crack extending into a building which has been damaged.
The new symbol for Animal Shelter that we created during the Iconathon could have been helpful to organizations like the ASPCA during the recent Hurricane Sandy. The animals displayed under the shelter roof can be swapped out or added, depending on if the shelter allows farm or exotic animals, for example.
As natural and human-made disasters continue to be more and more frequent, we look forward to working again with the Red Cross and other relief organizations to create more disaster-specific symbols to help in the most urgent of times.
Our latest Iconathon brought us to the Future of Web Design Conference in New York City where we partnered with Charity: Water to create a new set of clean water icons. It was fascinating to learn more about the Charity: Water mission and how the lack of clean drinking water is at the root of so many problems in developing nations. Learning about these struggles really gave a great sense of purpose to the day.
The referents we created symbols for during the day ranged from “Dirty Water” to “BioSand Filter.” Creating a universal way to visually communicate these ideas is important because so many languages are spoken in the developing nations where water is scarce. Below are some examples of the symbols created. You can view all the symbols here.
With Earth Day fast approaching many of our thoughts are again turning to the environment and how we can help preserve and sustain our beautiful planet.
The Noun Project recently partnered with Cree, Inc. to host an Iconathon to create new symbols for Energy Efficiency and LED Lighting. One of the goals we’ve set out for Iconathon is to add to the public domain a set of graphic symbols that communicate universally recognized concepts, in particular those that have yet to be visually defined. Although the idea of Energy Efficiency has been around for many years, it is just now gaining the kind of exposure and focus that requires it to have its own visual language to represent concepts like wind and solar farms, electric charging stations, and sustainable energy.
Thanks to the help from our Durham Iconathon participants, we’re thrilled to release 15 of these new symbols into the public domain. The symbols below can be found for download in our Iconathon Suite.
Energy Efficiency Event
Why a New Symbol for LED Lighting?
We asked Ginny Skalski, CREE’s Social Media Specialist this exact question.
“At Cree, we’ve been talking for a long time about the need for a symbol to represent LED lighting to help get people to think beyond the energy-wasting incandescent bulb and ugly fluorescent lighting. But we weren’t really sure what the symbol should look like. By teaming up with the Noun Project for an Iconathon, we were able to put a lot of thought into the symbol for LED lighting and other energy-efficient technologies.
The Iconathon process really allowed a diverse group of people to discuss the merits of a variety of designs. And through the critiques, many strong concepts emerged. It was remarkable to see sketches from the iconathon take on a life of their own as beautiful digital symbols.
Our hope is that these new symbols become the go-to images for the Lighting, Energy-Efficiency and Design industries. We’d love to see the new symbol for LED lighting become as universal as the first aid or no smoking symbols.”
LED Symbol Design Process
One of the core themes that emerged from the group critique was that LED is a radically different light source from any of its predecessors, and because of this we all felt it was appropriate and necessary to break free from any past “light bulb” design precedents. LED needed to have its own distinct and identifiable mark.
As a group we decided the two essential elements that needed to be present in the final design were the semiconductor microchip that produces the light, and of course light itself. During the group critique we observed that many of the sketches used a square to represent the chip. The final design uses this concept but displays the square as a three-dimensional diamond shape, thus creating the illusion of depth and volume. Representing the second element, light, turned out to be the greater challenge. When limited to black and white with no gradients, designers only have a few options to graphically represent light. Most of the sketches created at the Iconathon used lines emanating from the microchip to communicate a light source. However, after the event there was a realization that so many other icons used this same “emanating line” technique to represent a variety of concepts (i.e. sound), that we came to the conclusion that there should be a more unique and memorable way to illustrate light.
The solution we arrived upon is to use negative space to represent a powerful focused beam of light rising up from the microchip. We felt this created a much more dynamic, memorable, and bold design that still contains the same original elements agreed upon by the participants of the Iconathon.
Finally, we view these symbols not just as purely utilitarian, but also representative of where we are as a society, and what we want our future to look like. Creating symbols for these powerful ideas helps disseminate them by providing people with the visual tools to make their voices heard across contemporary communication platforms. We can’t wait to see how you use them and we hope you enjoy these symbols as much as we do.
A little over two months ago we set off on a cross-country design tour with Code for America and hundreds of passionate volunteers with the goal to create new civic minded symbols for the public domain. After countless hours of designing and refining from volunteers all over the country, we are proud to announce the Iconathon Symbol Suite is now available on The Noun Project.
The initial set contains 40 symbols within these topics: 311, Health & Nutrition, Democracy, Neighborhoods, Education, and Transportation. Each symbol was conceived at one of the six Iconathon design charrettes and created with a “Design for Good” attitude. The symbols are designed to work together as a set, each being the same size and having a consistent design aesthetic and line weight.
By placing these symbols into the public domain we hope they can be put to good use in your community and make a positive impact. We hope teachers and schools can use the bully symbol to educate their students about the damaging and lasting effects of bullying. We hope the food bank symbol can help guide the hungry and less fortunate to a nutritious meal. We hope the peaceful protest symbol can be used by protestors around the world trying to fight for change and a better life. Most of all though we hope these symbols can be used as an example of what can happen when you bring together volunteers who are passionate about their community.
We are still receiving symbols from our volunteers, and plan on continuing to add more civic symbols to this set over time. We’re excited to see this collection grow year after year. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Iconathon events, hosted us, supported us, and helped us get the word out about this Design for Good endeavor.
