How to improve the icon request process

[selenehinkley]

Documenting the Slack conversation around how to improve the icon request process and connecting it to our contribution project. @heyjoethomas @raquelbreternitz @laurkim (checking to see what Erin Moncrieff's github handle is).

Just throwing this out into the Slack-verse for thoughts, ideas, opinions or musings. One of the most common requests I see/get asked is for new icons. And the majority of the time folks don’t seem very confident or willing to actually do the icon design work. Which I get, cuz it seems like a different skillset and is intimidating. Wondering how we could alleviate this + maintain the high bar of quality of the icon library and make sure our repo and design tooling stay in sync. (edited)
10 replies

Erin Moncrieff 3 hours ago
This is something that’s been on my mind for a while too. Ideally it would fall on the illustration team, but we just don’t have enough hands. I was thinking about how I could include icons in the Illustration Library project, but haven’t come up with a solution yet.

Joe Thomas 3 hours ago
There are some things we could do to at least make it more approachable but asking someone who has likely never designed an icon before to design one will just always be a steep hill I think.
💯
2

Erin Moncrieff 3 hours ago
yeah, similarly to illustrations. Its daunting, and i get it.

Joe Thomas 3 hours ago
For sure

Selene Hinkley💤 2 hours ago
Hey you two! @Lo Kim will be helping writing our up to date version of the icon contribution guidelines. I'll share this thread with her and let her know you two might have thoughts/opinions/feedback for what she drafts. 🙂
:thank:
3

Raquel Rubio Breternitz⛔ 2 hours ago
Maybe not helpful and I apologize for popping into slack on vacation, but I've designed icons in the past for the IBM design language and would be happy to pitch in... perhaps there's a version where we can point people to a group of designers who do feel comfortable making icons and have some kind of queue / contribution process specific to that?
:thank:
1

Selene Hinkley💤 2 hours ago
Sounds great, @Raquel! I'l let @Lo Kim know you're keen to collaborate. I'll also DM you extra context about the icon contribution guidance she'll be drafting next week so we can ship an MVP in 2 weeks to the new style guide site. (edited)
🙏:skin-tone-3:
1

Joe Thomas 2 hours ago
That is an interesting idea @Raquel

Erin Moncrieff 2 hours ago
Yeah thats what we had been doing with the #icon-guild, but it got tough finding people to volunteer, and no one really owned it so it kind of faded away.
👍👍:skin-tone-3:
2

Raquel Rubio Breternitz⛔ 1 hour ago
Ah, not a new idea of course! Makes sense, I can see how it'd be hard to keep it up without at least being a dedicated portion of someone's role...but maybe with the new contribution guidelines it can get a little kick?
Ultimately I think with scale it can be someone's whole job but that's a whole other can of worms. At IBM I believe they ended up contracting out to an icon design agency (who knew those existed!)
Regardless, I'm happy to help/collab however I can, or just get out of the way :)