LED Lighting Gets New Icon

LED Lighting Gets New Icon

When I moved to Arizona there were some new signs I had to get used to.  Everyone knows what the sign with a picture of a person shoveling means or what a sign with a picture of a person swimming means.  I think the first “odd” sign I saw was for a cattle guard.  Then I saw one for antelope crossing.  Yup.  There are several other odd icons I didn’t know existed – and sort of wonder why you’d need an icon to describe the thing at all.  One of the newest icons is the LED lighting/energy-efficient lighting icon.  It is in no way similar to the icon of an incandescent or CFL bulb.  In fact, it doesn’t look like it represents lighting at all.  Not until I stumbled across the article that explains it all did I really see how it could be in any way related.

The website is called thenounproject.com and there are a LOT of icons listed there – some new, some seemingly ancient.  The first 15 on the “noun collection” page (at least when I went there around 10 p.m. on Wednesday) were all related to energy-efficiency or conservation and so forth.  

Back in February, Cree and the Noun Project got together to host an “Iconathon” to generate a symbol that can represent LED lighting, as well as other eco-friendly programs.  What came out of the daylong event looks like the “what do you see?” pictures – at least until someone described it.  The new LED icon incorporates the two most important things about an LED – the LED component that produces the light and the course of the light itself.  So it looks like a beam of light coming up from a 3-D diamond shape (representing the component) to cut through a larger black square (the “negative space” that the light is beaming through).

Article: http://www.mnn.com/your-home/at-home/blogs/led-lighting-becomes-iconic-at-symbol-generating-workshop

All icons: http://thenounproject.com/