It was also helpful to identify the problem, and articulate how we were going to solve it. And that’s still our mission today.Įdward: It’s sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world’s visual language. That was just incredibly valuable, to really articulate what the mission of the Noun Project was. That said, there are key, viable parts in it - like where we really took the time to write out the mission. If I could do it all over again, I do believe we got too caught up in trying to solve every problem that could potentially arise - and, really, you just never know which way the company is gonna go until you really launch it.Įdward: I think our first business plan is now sitting under a pile of junk in our credenza. There are a lot of things that we were able to think through just by writing the business plan. Sofya: I think that even though most likely your company will never follow your business plan to a T, it’s important to have something written down. Does your original business plan have any relation to what you guys are actually doing now? Another huge catalyst was that I got laid off during the recession, so, once that happened, I thought: “Let’s try to give this a go!” If I hadn’t been laid off, I probably wouldn’t have started it. How long were you gathering those symbols?Įdward: About a year. I believe that when you design, you really have to be with the problem for a long time to develop an elegant solution, and it was just very difficult to do that there. It didn’t really feel like the right way to design. At my job, there were so many times where someone would just grab me and say, “Hey, can you pick out some colors for this?” and you would know nothing about the project. What was the source of that disillusionment? The bureaucracy of working on client projects, or…?Įdward: Yeah, just the bureaucracy… and coming from design school, if the professor points to something on your project, you know every intimate detail of why you made that decision and what the design thinking was behind executing the idea that way. I was disillusioned pretty quickly, but I didn’t really see a way to change the situation. My first job out of school was at an architecture firm. What was your background prior to the germination of the Noun Project?Įdward: My background is in interior architecture from Iowa State University. But I couldn’t find a website that could provide them.Īnd looking at my silly machine sketches, I thought: “Why not keep that concept but steer it toward solving this real-world problem that I was experiencing at my architecture job?” That’s kind of how the idea grew. So that was how the idea for the Noun Project got started, I thought to myself: “It would be really great if I had a drawing of every single object or concept on the planet.” At that time, I was working at an architecture firm, and I had to make a lot of presentation boards for clients, and I always needed really high-quality symbols for trains, bicycles, and trucks. So I started to draw these really simple, cranes and trains and sequoias and all these silly things, and I found out that I still really enjoy drawing them. If something captivates you as a kid, there’s a very intrinsic reason. ![]() Then I had the idea to draw the things that used to really fascinate me as a child. It sounds like the Noun Project was born out of a personal obsession of sorts – can you tell me about that?Įdward: I’ve always done a lot of sketches of all kinds of different concepts, buildings, and objects, and I kind of just got bored of what I was drawing. New symbols are submitted daily by designers around the world, and the Noun Project team recently crowdsourced the translation of its library into 25 languages.We spoke with Edward and Sofya by phone about the childhood fixation that sparked the idea for their visual archive, the struggles of launching a start-up without any experience, and the unexpected rewards of seeing your project take on a life of its own. So simple it seems obvious, and so useful you can’t believe it didn’t exist before.įounded by the husband-and-wife team of Edward Boatman and Sofya Polyakov, along with designer Scott Thomas, The Noun Project launched in 2010 with a catalog of a few hundred icons and has since grown by leaps and bounds. (We say, “I should have thought of that!”) The Noun Project, a growing library of free, downloadable icons symbolizing objects and concepts, feels like one of those ideas. The best ideas, like the best song lyrics, feel familiar from the moment we encounter them.
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