The Iconathons are a new initiative to create civic symbols for the public domain. They came about as a partnership between Code for America & the Noun Project.
How the Iconathons came to be
One day at Code for America, I was looking at an app I was making for to help community group organizers in Seattle. I was thinking about how Code for America fellow Jeremy Canfield had the fellows do a post-it note braindump of all of the concepts in cities after our month. We had this 13 page list of every sub-topics in cities - from legislation to education, public safety, arts, transportation, emergency response and many others.
Fellows Karla Macedo & Michelle Koeth had been trying to figure out how to further develop an idea they had for "RedesignGov" - which would be a place for city governments to share the needs that they have with designers looking to serve the public good.
All of the Code for America fellows had been obsessed with the Noun Project. This is because the Noun Project looks like the future!
The Noun Project is a beautiful open online library of SVG vector graphics of universal symbols. We put these symbols in our apps.
But when we searched this very new project (they only just launched in December 2010 after a successful Kickstarter campaign) we noticed that there were not any results for concepts like 'health' or 'education.'
We love to give back, especially to projects that we think are awesome that we use ourselves. So Matt Lewis wrote fanmail to the NounProject, mainly because we were talking about how much we love them, and we wondered where they lived and if they were real people and if they were nice. (They are all of these things, and they are based in Los Angeles.)
Sofya Polyakov wrote us back, we all clicked, and thus the Iconathons were born.
6 weeks later, we have done 2 incredible Iconathon events, and have 4 more planned as part of an official series of collaborative events to make new civic symbols for the public domain. People are already planning Iconathons in Europe & the United States. We'll do another one in Oakland at the end of September, and plan to keep doing them. Later this fall we'll release the first "Municipal Symbol Suite" - which can be reused by anyone to help improve our visual communications in cities.
Press
August 16, 2011
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August 9, 2011
The Noun Project: Edward Boatman
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