The Noun Project – icons for everything!
I’m a big fan of using images in my teaching materials and communications with students. With the demise of Microsoft Clip Art, teachers are moving to royalty free stock image resources like Pixabay, Pexels and Unsplash.
However, many times, I want something simple but powerful, and that is where iconography comes in. Look at the icons in the blog header image above and ask yourself, what is their universal meaning?
Hopefully you identified that it was someone wanting to ask a question, no mobile phones and the universal symbol for the bathrooms.
The Noun Project began in 2010 from a Kickstart project and now is the premiere place to go for icons. The platform accepts submissions from creators and works are available for re-use under Creative Commons licensing. What does that mean for academics? Icons are free to use as long as you provide attribution to the creator. The Noun Project gives you an easy copy-and-paste attribution line to use in your work.
For educations I definitely recommend spending US$20 per year to upgrade to an NounPro for educators. The extra features you get include:
- Using images without the attribution line (don’t worry, creators receive a portion of your licence fee as payment)
- Plugins for the Microsoft suite of apps, Google apps and Adobe creative cloud apps
- The ability to colour your icons using pre-set colours or choose your own (either with RGB codes or Pantone codes)
Follow this link to the education pricing and have fun with using icons in your materials!
Dr Amanda White is a lecturer in Accounting at the University of Technology Sydney. She is a mum to 2 boys – Audit Senior and Audit Junior and is an alumni of Coopers and Lybrand and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Amanda has been teaching accounting for almost 20 years and specialises in teaching auditing and assurance. She has a regular audit news show “This Week in Audit” and many audit and study resources on her YouTube channel Amanda Loves to Audit. In 2017 she received a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning through the Awards for Australian University Teaching (AAUT, formerly the Office of Learning and Teaching).