Saturday, December 25, 2010

“The Noun Project” + SVG + Free + Metro like look and feel + 500 = Happy Windows Phone 7 Developers

istartedsomethingThe Noun Project and Metro, a match made in icon design heaven

“A new and upcoming graphics design initiative called “The Noun Project” is going to make a lot of Windows Phone 7 designers and developers very happy.

The project’s mission is to collect, organize and make available an extensive library of free pictograms/icons for common nouns and concepts that make up the universal visual language, which also happens to be a major theme in Microsoft’s Metro design style. The best part, all icons are guaranteed to be free.

…”

The Noun Project - Mission

"sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world's visual language"

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.

Here is our pledge to you:

Free

The symbols on this site are and always will remain free. We believe symbols can not be effectively shared with the world if they are not free.

Simple

Everyone likes simplicity. We want you to be able to come to our site and effortlessly find and obtain what you are looking for. Simple as that.

Fun

We think a language that can be understood by all cultures and people is a pretty amazing thing. We also think our symbols and the objects or ideas they represent are works of art worth celebrating. Check out our store.

Highest Quality

We get excited about things like scale, proportion, and shape. We are committed to design and quality in everything we do.

…” [GD: Page Leached in Full]

The Noun Project

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Being the “Graphically Challenged” guy that I am I really appreciate this kind of resource. I dig the simplicity and also the delivery (i.e. SVG files formatted for greater flexibility)

Here’s a shot of all the currently available icons to give you a feel for what’s available.  They have a kickstarter going if you like what you see and want to help…

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(via Microsoft Feed - Amazing Collection of 500+ Fresh Icons for your Windows Phone App!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dunno, am I nuts? They're all .svg files. Does WP7 and the toolset handle svg files natively? Or do you have to s*t a brick to convert the files to xaml?

Greg said...

Yep, they are all SVG files (cough... note the post's title... cough... ;)

The Noun Project isn't directly a WP7 targeted project, so that's why tI'm sure hey picked a broader standard file format like SVG.

So yeah, you're going to have to convert the SVG's to XAML. It doesn't look hard and there's a ton of examples on the net on how to do it...

Here's a post on that,
Looking for XAML Clip Art? Then make sure you look for SVG files as well...


Plus Inkscape supports SVG in and XAML out, which seems to be the commonly used means of converting SVG to XAML...

Yeah, it's a bit of a pain, but easier than drawing it yourself (I hope).