Sharing, Celebrating and Enhancing the World's Visual Language

January 11, 2011 6:42 PM

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so they may be shared in a fun and meaningful way. The goal is to collect and organize all the symbols that form our language into one easy-to-use online library that can be accessed by anyone. All the symbols on their site are completely free to download, and can be used for design projects, architecture presentations, art pieces — just about anything.
posted by netbros (22 comments total)

Sure, nouns are easy. Verbs usually require two symbols, a Before and an After, so books consisting entirely of verbs are twice as expensive as books consisting entirely of nouns.

Kidding aside, this reminds me of a book by Henry Dreyfus, "Symbol Sourcebook".
posted by twoleftfeet at 6:54 PM on January 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

My firefox started seizuring the second I opened it...
posted by keasby at 7:10 PM on January 11, 2011

Works fine in Chrome.

The little "loading nouns" sign made me unexpectedly happy.
posted by Joe Beese at 7:15 PM on January 11, 2011

The images are pretty nice, but I want a search function.
posted by LogicalDash at 7:40 PM on January 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Terrific. 4,000 years of the development of written language, and now we're back to pictograms. Thanks a lot, Internet.
posted by webmutant at 8:01 PM on January 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Agreed that nouns are the easiest words to symbolize, but this is still useful.

The question, though: how can I download the whole set? I want to actually build something with them.
posted by alms at 8:22 PM on January 11, 2011

Worked fine in my Firefox.

also.

OMG! THIS IS GREAT!
posted by oddman at 8:27 PM on January 11, 2011

11 - EXISTENTIAL DREAD
55 - THIS IS A STICK-UP
113 - SMALL PENIS AHEAD
120 - INCOMING CLOSE-UP
147 - "SURVEYOR'S MARKS"
154 - FUCKING DEER
194 - NUCLEAR
195 - NUCULAR
213 - SPOOKY FLASHLIGHT WARNING
285 - ROUTE OF ALL EVIL
289 - PHONE HOME
318 - OBVIOUS DISTRACTION
323 - HOOPSKIRT CROSSING
326 - CAUTION: MINNESOTA
333 - THAT'S A PADDLIN'
348 - CRAZY HAIR ZONE
349 - BARACK OBAMA
350 - BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
367 - GIANT BALL ADVISORY
384 - SARLACC PIT
386 - MAIMED ANGELS
388 - MACH-5 TOES
posted by Rhaomi at 8:38 PM on January 11, 2011 [7 favorites]

I like that they have a symbol for people who lie awake at night wondering if there's a god.

^{works okay for me in FF 3.6.13 with Adblock}
posted by taz at 8:56 PM on January 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

I like it! Could be *very* useful in various settings (hospitals, workplace) for people with disabilities affecting English acquisition and/or people with limited English for another reason.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 9:37 PM on January 11, 2011

❄ + ⌛ = ☃
posted by not_on_display at 10:14 PM on January 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Inconsistent, baffling, and frequently clunky icon work. As Neven pointed out, you can get results like that with Google images.
posted by droob at 10:29 PM on January 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I found Siruca Pictograms recently.

An icon/pict library optimized for stencilling, with a CC licence.

I’d love to design a lot of new picts for my Siruca Pictograms™ but I can’t find the time, so I decided to change the license of this font to a share alike Creative Commons license
You can download the font, use it in any way you like (including commercial work) and modify it, but don’t forget to send me back your updated font.

Siruca Pictograms™ is designed to works with Siruca™ font.
It’s a stencil font with rounded terminations, and this characteristic must be keeped.

posted by zamboni at 10:43 PM on January 11, 2011

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posted by twoleftfeet at 12:28 AM on January 12, 2011

This existed already way way back
posted by mitocan at 2:05 AM on January 12, 2011

UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT are adverbs, not nouns. HANDLE WITH CARE is a verb and it's synonym, FRAGILE an adjective ... yes, am being a pedant; but if it is going to be the NOUN project, might as well go for nouns only
posted by liza at 5:26 AM on January 12, 2011

I'm unable to find an image to link to, but I remember that tractors in the '80s had an accompanying symbol on all the instrument panel gauges, kind of like in cars where the oil pressure gauge has the little oil can. They had about 15 gauges and had to get really creative for things like "hydraulic oil temperature", "transmission fluid pressure" and "power takeoff RPM".
posted by 445supermag at 7:12 AM on January 12, 2011

Having done searches for this numerous times in the past, I am damn happy to see someone put together this list. Even just a year ago, it was a crap shoot doing searches for icons and symbols. You'd turn up the weirdest stuff.

I must remember to be grateful for all the time and effort that others have put into the Internet and all the itty bitty but vital web sites that comprise it. Savor this time MeFites, we'll be telling our grandchildren about how it was like when just anybody could put a website up.
posted by Xoebe at 8:16 AM on January 12, 2011

HORSES
posted by dougrayrankin at 11:28 AM on January 12, 2011

Here's the AIGA/DOT symbols, which would seem to be one of the starting points for the Noun Project. Available in EPS & GIF, copyright free!
posted by epersonae at 12:32 PM on January 12, 2011

taz: "I like that they have a symbol for people who lie awake at night wondering if there's a god."

See, I could have sworn that was the universal symbol for "What the fuck was I thinking?!"
posted by iamkimiam at 12:56 PM on January 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

They don't seem to have a search feature or text-based list. If I have something in mind that I want to represent, I'll just have to scroll through and see if anything looks good. If I get bored, I'll just stop scrolling, find a nearby symbol, and then talk about that instead of whatever I wanted to talk about.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 1:22 PM on January 12, 2011