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.