Neighborhood Revitalization Iconathon planned in San Francisco for June 30th

June 13, 2012 By in New Events 2 Comments

The Noun Project and Code for America have partnered with the City of San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation to host an Iconathon on Saturday, June 30th.  The design workshop will focus on creating a set of public domain symbols to visually communicate Neighborhood Revitalization.  These symbols will cross language and illiteracy barriers to communicate things like community gardens, stores that sell healthy food, and places to see public art.

We are working with San Francisco’s Central Market/Tenderloin neighborhoods as the site to inspire ideas for symbols.  This event is free and open to the public, anyone is welcome to participate – no design skills required!  Space is limited, so please RSVP.

Image of Tenderloin by Jake Levitas

We’d love to get your input about what symbols you think should be created during this Iconathon.  Please visit ImproveSF to see what symbols we’re considering, to submit your ideas and vote for your favorites.

Event Details

Date: Saturday, June 30th
Time: 10am to 3pm
Location: Code for America Headquarters at 155 9th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
Theme: Neighborhood Revitalization
Speaker on “Central Market Area Revitalization”: Ellyn Parker from the Mayor’s Office of Economic Workforce and Development
Speaker on “Tactical Urbanism”: Dan Parham, co-founder of Neighborland
Speaker on “Symbol Design & User Comprehension”: Edward Boatman, co-founder and Creative Director of The Noun Project
Lunch: sponsored by Bars + Tone and faberNovel
Collaborators: Code for America, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation and City & County of San Francisco
RSVP: Eventbrite

About San Francisco’s Central Market/Tenderloin Neighborhood

The Central Market neighborhood is a stretch of Market Street from 5th Street to Van Ness Avenue in the heart of San Francisco.  Situated next to Tenderloin, the neighborhood has for decades suffered from blight and neglect.  In 2010, San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development launched the Central Market Partnership, a public/private initiative to renew and coordinate efforts to revitalize the Central Market neighborhood. The City’s goal is to restore Central Market as San Francisco’s downtown arts district by inviting in new retail, restaurants, services and employers, at the same time as ensuring against displacement.

The efforts to revitalize and transform the Central Market area have culminated in companies like Zendesk and Twitter paving the way forward by moving their headquarters to the area.

For more information visit www.centralmarketpartnership.org

Code for America’s Iconathon Season

May 30, 2012 By in Blog Posts Leave a comment

The Noun Project is excited to once again partner with fellows from Code for America to host a series of Iconathons for their cities!

Please join us in welcoming this year’s 2012 Code for America fellows Diana Tran, Emily Wright Moore and Angel Kittiyachavalit.  Iconathon was started a year ago through a joint effort between The Noun Project and Code for America’s 2011 fellows Chacha Sikes and Karla Macedo, and we look forward to hosting this year’s CfA Iconathons in San Francisco, Austin, Honolulu and Chicago.

We would love to hear your comments about what topics you think are most relevant to those cities.

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, a non-profit organization that matches software geniuses with US cities to reboot local services.  Check out her inspiring TED talk below.

New Energy Efficiency Symbols now in the Public Domain

April 18, 2012 By in Event Reviews, Symbol Releases Leave a comment

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 , 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.

LED Symbol

Sustainable Energy Symbol

New Iconathon – “Energy Efficiency” with Cree in Durham, N.C.

February 7, 2012 By in New Events Leave a comment

On Saturday, February 25th The Noun Project is heading to Durham, N.C. for the first Iconathon of 2012!  If you’re in the area, we’d love for you to join us in creating new symbols for Energy Efficiency.  Space is limited, so please RSVP.

This day-long collaborative design workshop is sponsored by Cree, Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of LEDs and LED lights.  A few months ago they reached out to us,  bummed that the old incandescent light bulb and the twisty CFL bulb are still the only symbols used to represent lighting.  What’s amazing is that the incandescent light bulb has been around for 132 years, and yet whenever we need to symbolically represent “new” ideas, we still use the old bulb as the go-to symbol (we’ve been guilty of this many times).  But just think of all the innovative strides that have been made in the past 132 years.  Take, for example, the telephone.  If you go through the list of symbols for telephone on our site, you can see a beautiful progression from the candlestick telephone, to the behemoth first portable phones, to finally the new slender and compact iPhones.  Although there may not be so many drastic progressions for the light bulb, one of the symbols we want to design during this Energy Efficiency workshop is a new symbol for LED light – the most energy-efficient lighting to date (about 85% more efficient than incandescent bulbs and mercury-free unlike CFL’s).  How amazing would it be if this new symbol became the “it” symbol for new ideas, progressive thinking, and of course – light, just like the original incandescent light bulb has been for over 100 years?!

Think about how many other symbols we’re lacking that could represent the recent developments in Energy Efficiency.  Can you visualize a symbol for solar farms, weatherized homes, or wind turbines?  These technologies are so new, there just aren’t any easily-recognized symbols for them yet.  And we want to change that.

The event will begin with a presentation about Symbol Design & User Comprehension by Edward Boatman, co-founder & Creative Director of The Noun Project.  Paul Pickard, former head of research and development for Cree lighting, will speak about the important role energy-saving technologies play in conserving energy. Paul and his team designed and commercialized the first commercially viable LED downlight, so he is very passionate about energy-efficiency.  The presentations will be followed by a sponsored lunch, and then it’s on to creating a new set of universally-recognized symbols for Energy Efficiency!

As with all of our previous design workshops, the final set of graphic symbols will be added to the public domain and available for anyone to download for free.  You can see the symbols created during the previous events in the Iconathon symbol suite.

RSVP on EventBrite, or recommend which symbols we should create.

Iconathon Symbol Suite is Here

October 18, 2011 By in Symbol Releases Leave a comment

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.

Iconathon Wrap Up and Introducing Icon Camp

September 26, 2011 By in Blog Posts Leave a comment

We really enjoyed working with Code for America in planning theIconathon events and meeting so many talented civicly engaged people in each city that hosted us.  Thank you to everyone who attended Iconathon, Designed for Good, and helped us get the word out about the events!  We know that the symbols created will have a great impact for the communities that use them.

As we conclude our cross-country tour of Iconathons, we wanted to share with you what was accomplished and how you can get involved.

Iconathon Team

The Iconathon Team

Event Overview

If you haven’t attended an Iconathon in your city, here’s an overview of the events.  Each city’s Iconathon had its own civic theme ( – 311,  – Food & Nutrition,  – Democracy,  – Neighborhoods,  – Education,  – Transportation).  The events started out with a presentation by an expert in each city’s theme.  For example, since Boston’s Iconathon focused on designing new symbols for Education, we invited Lee McGuire, Chief Communications Officer for the Boston Public Schools, and Deb Socia, Executive Director of OpenAirBoston, to provide participants with an overview of some of the challenges that will be addressed through the use of these newly designed symbols.  The Education symbols, for one, will enable better communication for children with learning disabilities, autism, illiteracy (such as refugees and children affected by homelessness), or for whom English is a second language (see our previous blog for more info). Speakers like  from Occidental College’s Urban & Environmental Policy Institute also explained some less commonly used terms, such as the “Food Security” and “WIC” concepts used during LA’s Health & Nutrition Iconathon.

This was followed by a presentation in which our Creative Director, , discussed user comprehension and how it applies to symbol design. The presentation will be available for viewing once we launch User Submissions, as we found it very helpful in explaining best symbol design practices.  Then we kicked off a two-hour  where designers and non-designers worked together in teams of three to five to create new symbols for concepts such as Pothole, Fair Trade, Equal Rights, Citizenship, Student Attendance, and .  Each Iconathon ended with  about which symbols were designed, what design challenges the group faced, and an overview of which symbols were successful in communicating their intention.

What We Learned

Designing symbols is no easy task, especially when the referents designers are trying to define are broad in scope (such as Mentorship, Freedom of Information Act, Public vs. Private Ownership, or Sustainably-Produced).  Therefore, it was essential that we communicated reasonable expectations at the beginning of each Iconathon.  Not every term was going to be defined, some are easier than others, and some need extra time to work out the bare essence of what turns a concept into an easy-to-understand symbol.

We also found it beneficial to have different skill sets in each break-out group.  When our participants arrived at the event we asked them to select a name tag that best described them.  The options were:  1. graphic designer, 2. cool person who cares about civic design (a non designer), and 3. an expert in the chosen Iconathon theme.

When we formed the breakout groups we tried to make sure every group had all three skill sets present.  We found this approach worked very well because the topic expert could give context to the discussion, the non-designer could give honest non biased feedback on how well the symbol sketches were communicating the referent, and the designer could execute the design.

Below are some examples of works in progress, as well as some of the completed symbols that will be part of the “Civic Symbols” suite that will be released into the public domain this Fall.

Food Bank

Guerilla Gardening

Introducing Icon Camp

We found this year’s Iconathons to be exciting and inspiring, and are looking forward to getting even more people and organizations involved next year.  During our travels through different cities we heard from a lot of participants who wanted to host their own local Iconathon events in order to create and share civic symbols for themes such as Social Services, Women’s Health, and the Arts.

Therefore, we’ve decided to continue our partnership with our friends at Code for America and introduce “Icon Camp”, a movement of independently-organized Iconathon events held on a local level.   Icon Camp was created to allow designers and civic minded people to continue the spirit of Designing for Good by applying the tested and tried features from this year’s Iconathon.   Please visit Host an Icon Camp to find out more about how to organize a local Icon Camp in your community!  Symbols created during Icon Camp can be submitted to The Noun Project, and if they meet the stylistic and technical requirements, will be placed into the “Civic Symbols” category under a public domain license.

Why We Need New Symbols for Education – a Powerful Speech by one of our Boston Presenters

September 14, 2011 By in Educational Leave a comment

We wanted to share with you this great speech given by Deb Socia, Executive Director of OpenAirBoston, at one of our last Iconathon events held at the MIT Media Lab on September 3rd. Along with our other speakers, Deb did an amazing job of explaining how the symbols we designed for Education will make an impact. Thank you to all who participated!

Hi! My name is Deb Socia and I have just begun my 33rd year as an educator.  I have held nearly every job in my field – from teacher to curriculum specialist to program director to principal.  In my last role, I was the founding principal of a 650 student middle school in the Grove Hall section of Dorchester.  We developed and implemented a 1:1 laptop program which led me to my current role – figuring out how to ensure equitable access to hardware, training and low cost internet – for every member of our community

Like all professions, education has more than its share of jargon.  Take student assessment, for example.  Assessments can be authentic, competency based, constructivist and cooperative.  They might be developmentally appropriate, cross-curriculuar, innovative, inquiry-centered, and integrated.  They could involve higher order thinking, be multidisciplinary, open-ended, and technology-enhanced.  No kidding.

Putting aside the jargon, just think of the alphabet soup of acronyms and initials we use:

Students can be labeled ELL, ESOL, ESL or LD, CP, OCD, ADD, ED, and therefore need an IEP that specifies PT, OT, or ST, which of course is required by IDEA and ADA.

Teachers need to prepare students for MCAS, PSAT, AP, ACE, IMP, NAEP, and of course STEM careeers.  All of which is of course monitored by DESE and NCLB who will announce whether or not a school made AYP.

We hope our students get to participate in OST, AVID, TGH, and maybe even PBIS and that the teachers receive enough PD to create effective SIPs and DLPs and SLOs.  And of course, we really want parents to join the PTA.

And we wonder why the vast majority of people feel as though we are speaking in a foreign tongue!

And guess what!  I have used all those jargony terms, acronyms and initials on multiple occasions within the past six months!  And I know better.

We all need to learn to say what we mean in plain, everyday language or we run the risk of alienating those who most need to understand us.

That is why I am SO excited about this project.  If we had universally known, free and downloadable icons for many of our school based programs, activities, and spaces, imagine the impact.  Imagine the ways in which your work can contribute to a person’s ability to be more independent and confident.

In particular, imagine what it would mean to the parent of a child with a significant medical condition to see the icon that indicates “nurse” in every school her child attends?

Imagine the Mom who has just moved to this country from Somalia – unlikely to read, write, or speak any English – but who can easily interpret the symbol for Main Office in all of her children’s schools.

Do you remember being 13?  As you may remember, adolescence is a very difficult time to be “different” and not being a fluent reader is a very painful and exclusionary experience. Imagine how helpful it is to the child who is learning disabled to see the sign for cafeteria and then to know she is heading in the right way to get their lunch.

Imagine the pride on the part of a student with a cognitive delay when he can identify all the areas of the school that he frequents.

Imagine an autistic student having a pass to go to the gymnasium and that the pass in his hand is an exact copy of the symbol on the doorway to the gymnasium.  Imagine even further that it could be color-coded.  Or maybe even three dimensional to further enhance the sensory experience – leading to even more independence.

And the need for clear, simple and recognizable symbols is not just for folks whose circumstances lead them to have difficulty with reading or comprehending.  People who know me well are quite aware of my personal inability to find my way from anywhere to anywhere, regardless of the number of times I have traveled the same path.  I would love the reinforcement of having recognizable symbols support my efforts.  Verbal directions are not exactly helpful to me.  If I asked someone facing me how to get to the nearest wi-fi hot spot and they said “go down the hall and turn left”, I would get to the spot down the hall and wonder whose left?  Mine?  Or hers?  Every day when I get to work I have to think…which button on the elevator will get me to my office?   An intuitive symbol would make all the difference.

What you do here today matters. School staff may try to accommodate all of the folks who may need such tools, but first of all, they know very little about design and second, they are unlikely to find a way to ensure universality of use across a school and district, allowing for the all important consistency of experience for families and children.   I love that your work can lead to shared experiences for teachers, parents, and children – in and around schools and with educational tools.

Your work has powerful potential.  I am proud to be here to encourage you, to congratulate you, and to thank you.

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