This is awesome, I was actually just looking for a set of food icons I could purchase for my side project.
Noun Project – Icons for Everything
71–80 of 147 posts
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah the halcyon days of September last year when I made nearly $40. Still, it's free beer money, and a good enough way to distribute work to the public domain. It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
> It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community. You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things. Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
For example: https://github.com/pugjs/pug/issues/2189
Jade had to rename. They picked 'Pug' and needed a logo. christopherdowson asks if anyone can propose a logo and ends up creating the final logo.
Pretty neat thread IMO.
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying creating and sharing icon sets is not a get-rich-quick-scheme? ;)
Ah the halcyon days of September last year when I made nearly $40. Still, it's free beer money, and a good enough way to distribute work to the public domain. It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
I’m sure there are loads of open-source projects that would benefit from design contributions, they just don’t necessarily think to ask for it.
(For example, I could use a bit of help later this year from someone with a UI/UX/web background.)
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah the halcyon days of September last year when I made nearly $40. Still, it's free beer money, and a good enough way to distribute work to the public domain. It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
> It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community. You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things. Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
I've tried with mixed results. Some OS projects have been super grateful for tiny things such as favicons and logo vectorisation, but in my experience most tend to acknowledge but not implement work sent on spec.
After a quick search I've just discovered opensourcedesign.net which I'll definitely look at contributing to. This would be great for designers portfolios http://opensourcedesign.net/jobs
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#75This really reminds my of the glory days of clip art :) I for one really liked those so no harm meant :) The next thing is clippy coming back (oh wait that's all those chat bots) :)
Getting hit with the nostalgia of flipping through a giant book and locating the corresponding disc with the icon I wanted!
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#76Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation. Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp... (also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example) Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if thoug…
Icons and text are exactly the same thing. They're both language; visual forms that mean something.
We're more used to text, because text has a lot of nice properties as a medium for language so it has become pervasive. It's generally low dimensional and has high composability. For low bandwidth mediums it's ideal, because it's also low bandwidth.
But that doesn't mean icons aren't a language and aren't just as useful as text. They just have different strengths and weaknesses. Icons are higher bandwidth and higher dimensional (a tiny 32x32 grayscale image has 1024 dimensions!). But they're also very dense. What could take a large amount of physical space to describe with text, might only take a small 32x32 space with an icon.
All that to say, I don't disagree with your assessment of the situation. But I don't think it should be viewed as icons vs text, as if they're two completely different things. It should be viewed as a general problem of effective communication. Text can be just as bad. Imagine reading "subtract b from a and divide that result by q" versus "(a - b) / q". The latter is a more efficient language which most everyone will understand. Better to use the latter.
What if instead of writing "save" and "load" the designers wrote "serialize game state" and "deserialize game state". It means the same thing, but clearly "save" and "load" are better. Why? More people will understand them, and the extra information communicated by the verbose alternative isn't necessary.
Just as in a lot of situations an icon, if generally understood by the UI's target audience, can be a better alternative than writing "save" and "load".
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#77What I really need is a quality Verb Project
What are you thinking? They call it the Noun Project, but they seem to cover verbs pretty well from the few examples I tried.
Ex. "Bat" https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=bat&i=660766
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#78I always look for the icons with multiple gears. Have not found one which would actually work: Gears not touching, size difference blocks, or three gears in deadlock. :)
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#79There are about a million words in the English language. The site has a long way to go to get to "everything". Me, I'll stick with phonetic alphabets, which have long displaced icons. Interestingly, iconic languages usually wound up assigning sounds to the icons and were transformed into phonetic alphabets. Icons just aren't practical.
Of course not. ;)
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it harder to learn what the word "SAVE" means than to learn that a square box with a circle in it means "save"? Yes. The second is more distinct visually from other icons, and you can even discern it with just a glance, whereas various words are all juxtapositions of letters. There's a reason traffic signs the world over use a visual language.
Wow. Suppose I see a squiggle on some program. Where do I go to look up its meaning? I can't even type it in. Let's take that | that now means "ON" on electrical equipment. If you guessed that it meant "1" because you're a computer/electrical engineer, wouldn't you already know what "ON" meant? If you aren't, how would you guess what | means? Flip the switch back and forth to see what it does? If you're resorting to…
>Suppose I see a squiggle on some program. Where do I go to look up its meaning? I can't even type it in.
It's either one of the well known vocabulary of icons used across programs (e.g. floppy disk for save, house for "home", x for delete, etc), or a new one you can just hover over and read what it does in the tooltip.
After the first time (or couple of times), you don't need to read that again, and you'll recognize it very fast (not like stopping and reading it).