Started by Daniel Burka, Health Icons is a volunteer-run project that meets an urgent need in healthcare. As a team of more than 20 contributors, we created an open-source database of more than a 1000 health-related icons including symbols for different blood types, sex workers, and diagnostic tests. Available for anyone to use, edit, republish as a public domain global good.
Year
2018-Present
Contribution
Icon design
Icon audit
Export optimization
Process design
Guidelines creation
What impact did we make
We got a lot of positive feedback from designers and healthcare workers worldwide, the icons are used by WHO and in Rafael Nadal's Forma app. We got featured in Fast Company and Smashing Magazine Newsletter
A comprehensive collection of health icons. Might be wise to keep it by.
— Ozan Öztaskiran (@ozanoz) January 27, 2023
Discovered by @WalterStephanie https://t.co/QqaLkkn6Ro pic.twitter.com/BVdWtkxSdI
Ever spent hours hunting for the perfect icon for your health presentation, only to settle for something from 1999?
— Kevin Den Heijer (@kevindenheijer) June 18, 2024
Check out the iconic (hah) https://t.co/bjQ0zL6y7a – the superhero I didn’t know I needed! From livers icons to primary care, they’ve got it. Free & open-source!
Just came across these excellent, FREE, OPEN source health icons. 1166 of them. Editing is ok. Republishing is ok. No need to give credit. And you can download them all at once. Thankyou @health_icons. https://t.co/lLWG0oYUUA
— @southmapr (@southmapr) March 2, 2022
Buat kalian yang sedang mengerjakan project tentang kesehatan atau medis dan butuh icons yang berhubungan dengan tema tersebut, bisa ke https://t.co/Kr26ZxDNEf | Thanks a lot to @dburka who created this awesome resources! pic.twitter.com/vJjw575pf3
— Dwinawan (@dwinawan_) September 22, 2022
My learnings
Apart from designing icons, my main focus in the project was developing workflows that would help us maintain and expand the project.
As we finished the first set, we faced one of the challenges that working in a large, distributed team brought:– the icons – however clear and updated – lacked the consistency of style and visual weight. With a few contributors being up for the challenge of auditing, we set out to polish our set.
Using a collaborative tool made it easy for us to comment on each other's work and create a consistent style. We quickly realized that we need a system to track progress and organize the icons, so I developed a straightforward traffic light system workflow.
After auditing all the icons, we worked on a style guide – this was a big step to make independently creating new consistent icons easier for collaborators less familiar with the set.
As we perfected the workflow of creating new icons, we realized we need more than just a style guide. Having already picked up leadership on the workflow, I created a workflow guide too, to empower other contributors to take more ownership.
Looking to the future
We want Healthicons to help as many people and organizations as possible –we keep designing new icons for the set – anyone can request new icons on the website.
Additionally, we started a big undertaking – we're currently developing a new subset of material-design-friendly icons based on Healthicons. It's a massive feat – we have over 1000 icons at this moment – so we decided to start with 100 more useful icons to kickstart the project. At this moment, we are halfway there; take a peek at some of the icons I've been working on:
Head over to healthicons.org to explore the set and check what we're working at the moment – we are always looking for new contributors.