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The City of San Francisco is continually working to revitalize blighted neighborhoods across the city. As part of this effort, we partnered with The Noun Project and Code for America to host an Iconathon design workshop to create a set of symbols to visually communicate neighborhood revitalization. These symbols cross language and illiteracy barriers to communicate things like community gardens, stores that sell healthy food, or places to see public art (to name just a few examples).

We posted this ImproveSF challenge to get your opinions and ideas on what revitalization efforts we should create symbols for. We received 126 ideas, ranging from Bike Parking to Historical Site.

On the morning of June 30th of 2012, sixty people gathered at Code for America's headquarters to collaborate, sketch, and design icons! After hearing from some great speakers, everyone broke into groups of four or five and picked several ideas to start creating. You can see all the pictures from the Iconathon here.

After working in groups, each team presented their symbols to the larger group for a critique.

With this feedback, the Iconathon wrapped up and the sketches were sent off to the Noun Project designers to be vectorized and refined. The resulting set of icons can be seen here. The symbols are now in the public domain and may be used freely by anyone!

About Iconathons
Iconathons are facilitated design workshops organized by The Noun Project in partnership with organizations and sponsors across the country. Symbols serve as some of the best tools to overcome many language and cultural communication barriers. The aim of Iconathons is to add to the public domain a set of graphic symbols that can be used to easily communicate concepts frequently needed in civic design.

Besides contributing much-needed civic minded symbols to the public domain, Iconathons also bring together people from all aspects of the community. Participants include educators, non-profits, civic leaders & volunteers, government officials and designers. Iconathons are specifically designed to let the public participate in the design process and to further increase their understanding of the civic topics they engage with. Previous Iconathons have created public domain symbols for concepts like “human rights”, “food bank”, “electric car”, and “sustainable energy”. The entire Iconathon symbol suite can be seen here.

About The Noun Project
The Noun Project is a crowd-sourced online collection of the symbols and icons that form the world’s visual language. Their goal is to allow anyone to visually communicate any concept across any cultural or language barrier and deliver information effectively and instantaneously. It is created and shared by a vibrant international community.

About Code for America
Code for America is a non-profit organization that helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web. They make it easy and attractive for the web generation to give back through Fellowships, which connect technologists with cities to work together to innovate; their Accelerator, which supports disruptive civic startups; and Brigade, which helps local, community groups reuse civic software.