“And every month, we pay out a nice chunk of money to the designers. According to Sofya, 98% of Noun Project contributors have opted in to the feature. There was clearly a need for an option to pay not to have to attribute.”Īnd Noun Project designers jumped at the opportunity. “Or people in the advertising world, who don’t want the attribution to distract from the ad. “The local department of transportation can’t exactly attribute a designer on the side of a bus,” Sofya says. Because users can pay a small fee to have the attribution requirement for an icon waived, and those fees go to keeping both The Noun Project and the designers in business. They donate high-quality work because when that work gets used, it means free marketing and advertising for them.”Īnd The Noun Project isn’t just Sofya’s passion it’s her job too. “For a lot of our designers, this isn’t just their passion it’s their job.

Sofya sees CC BY as the perfect sweet spot: keeping the icons as free as possible while maintaining the recognition that designers need. If you design an icon for The Noun Project, you have two choices: the CC0 public domain declaration, which waives your copyright as completely as possible under the law and the Creative Commons Attribution license ( CC BY), which lets others use it for any purpose, commercial or noncommercial, as long as they attribute you. We needed a license that was as liberal as possible.

We had to make The Noun Project as easy as possible, or no one would use it. “It’s so easy for somebody to go to a website and rip off its designs. We knew that we needed a license that would be applicable worldwide, and that we had to maximize usability of the icons themselves.”Īccording to Sofya, The Noun Project wouldn’t work if there were a lot of complicated rules and restrictions on how the icons could be used. She explains how her team discovered Creative Commons licensing: “We came to a point where we realized that we needed to decide what license to apply to icons. Sofya Polyakov is cofounder of The Noun Project. The quality of the design work has made The Noun Project the first place to look for icons for software, signs, infographics, and much more. The icons are available in vector formats, meaning that it’s easy to adapt, resize, or color them without sacrificing image quality. The Noun Project is a huge archive of downloadable icons - simple, concise drawings representing everything from toothbrushes to Scotland. If you’re not familiar with The Noun Project, your life is about to get a lot easier.

Public domain icons for commercial use