Iconathons are facilitated design workshops organized by Noun Project in partnership with organizations and sponsors across the country.  Symbols serve as some of the best tools to overcome many language and cultural communication barriers.  The aim of Iconathon is to add to the public domain a set of graphic symbols that can be used to easily communicate concepts frequently needed in civic design.

Besides contributing much-needed civic minded symbols to the public domain, Iconathons also bring together people from all aspects of the community. Participants include educators, non-profits, civic leaders & volunteers, government officials and designers.  Iconathons are specifically designed to let the public participate in the design process and to further increase their understanding of the civic topics they engage with. Previous Iconathons have created public domain symbols for concepts like  “human rights”, “food bank”, “electric car”, and “sustainable energy”.

The entire Iconathon symbol suite can be seen here.

You can also read our Blog post about How the Iconathons Came to Be with the help of Chacha Sikes and Karla Macedo from Code for America.