We started to learn about this because of the Noun Project.
Sofya Polyakov: A lot of autistic children tend to be visual learners and visual communicators. We realized that being able to communicate an idea through a symbol is powerful for pretty much anyone. We started as a resource for designers, but very quickly we got a lot of teachers reaching out to us, and people dealing with kids with autism. I talked to a lot of other designers with that same gripe, and so I took this old concept that I had back in college and steered it toward solving this real-world problem. And then when I was working at Gensler in Santa Monica, I was putting together a lot of presentation boards for clients and I needed a way to communicate graphically-sometimes abstract concepts, sometimes concepts as simple as a bicycle or an airport-and I just couldn’t find a library online that could provide me with the content I needed. It was just very much a concept at this point. I noticed that they were all nouns and I started this big collection of sketches of all these different nouns.ĮB: Loose pieces of paper. I did a lot of sketches of simple objects-all different kinds of cool things that inspired me as a kid. Mother Jones: Tell me more about the origins of the projectĮdward Boatman: It was one of those ideas that kind of slowly grew over time and has lots of layers to it. The gears-not really that important.” It may seem easy, but the design sense and craft that go into, say, a beer mug icon, he says, show that someone thought “that beer, that simple object, was special.” The key, Boatman says, is “really stripping the concept to the bare essence.” A bicycle’s spokes “would just be kind of erased. The 17,000 icons to date include existing ones you may recognize from airports, hospitals, and national parks-and loads more submitted by artists from around the globe. Run by Boatman and Sofya Polyakov (they’re married), the website collects and distributes iconography for a pittance. In college, Edward Boatman was a “pretty rigorous” sketcher of simple objects like “cranes and sequoias and trucks.” As his collection grew, “I thought to myself, ‘It would be really interesting if I had a way to visually communicate every noun or concept in existence.'” Hence the Noun Project.
The noun project content licence free#
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