Foodicons Challenge

Foodicons Challenge now is over!

Foodicons Challenge: Beginning in December 2020, Adobe, The Lexicon, Noun Project, and AIGA 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.

➜ Short description

Beginning in December 2020, Adobe, The Lexicon, Noun Project, and AIGA 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.

The Foodicons Challenge is a crowdsourced competition to collaboratively design an extensive system of open-sourced icons of critical food terms and concepts that can be used globally by professionals and consumers alike.

The purpose of this project is to help create wider understanding among all of the people who participate in various food systems around the world, from those who grow, prepare, and sell food to those who eat it. Visual languages can help people communicate more universally, across borders, languages, and backgrounds.

A series of five monthly challenges will focus on agrobiodiversity, climate change, food waste, plants and proteins, the circular economy of food, food equity, true cost accounting and regenerative agriculture.

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.

Style Guidelines

Foodicons use an outline icon style, also commonly called linear icons. This style is clean, modern and simple to create.
The elements use monochromatic lines that can have subtitle empty spaces, separating different sections of the composition. This icon style uses unique hexagon shapes, which highlights the icon’s identity and represent different meanings. These different hexagon styles help to give the design system more flexibility, while maintaining a unified look and feel.
While simple, the style is effective, and when used in smaller sizes and can easily be put into clusters that enable storytelling in relation to food systems.

➜ Who may enter?

Open to anyone worldwide. Entrants must be at least 18 years of age on the date the competition closes (February 14, 2021).

➜ Prize:

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.