Announcing the international

Foodicons Challenge.

Beginning in December 2020, Adobe, The Lexicon, and Noun Project will host a series of five monthly challenges for designers to develop a shared, open-source, and royalty-free iconographic language of food to be unveiled at the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

Interested in joining the challenge? Sign-up to receive updates.

How it works

The Foodicons Challenge will develop a cooperatively-built visual language for over 500 core concepts to explain our food system. Final selections will be publicly released at the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, then posted permanently on The Noun Project as a free resource for all to use.

All artists participating in the Foodicons Challenge will agree to dedicate their work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. The work will be open-sourced for global use under a CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons License. Learn more about CC BY 4.0 here.

The icon set will provide food system professionals with an effective way to communicate with colleagues, organizations, and the public. The goal is to not only to provide people with greater food literacy, but also make the food system more transparent.

Using a style guide specifically developed for the challenge, designers worldwide are invited to submit icon designs for hundreds of terms selected by the Foodicon’s international committee of food experts. The icons will depict everything from basic elements like water, rice, and gluten, to more complex concepts like no-till farming, plant-forward diets, and appropriate technology.