Noun Project
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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Noun Project
The Noun Project is a for-profit company offering an online platform to display visual icons from a global network of designers. Founded in 2010 in the U.S.
thenounproject.com
Revenue model: charging a transaction fee, charging for custom services
Interview date: October 6, 2015
Interviewee: Edward Boatman, cofounder
Profile written by Paul Stacey
The Noun Project creates and shares visual language. There are millions who use Noun Project symbols to simplify communication across borders, languages, and cultures.
The original idea for the Noun Project came to cofounder Edward Boatman while he was a student in architecture design school. He’d always done a lot of sketches and started to draw what used to fascinate him as a child, like trains, sequoias, and bulldozers. He began thinking how great it would be if he had a simple image or small icon of every single object or concept on the planet.
When Edward went on to work at an architecture firm, he had to make a lot of presentation boards for clients. But finding high-quality sources for symbols and icons was difficult. He couldn’t find any website that could provide them. Perhaps his idea for creating a library of icons could actually help people in similar situations.
With his partner, Sofya Polyakov, he began collecting symbols for a website and writing a business plan. Inspiration came from the book Professor and the Madman, which chronicles the use of crowdsourcing to create the Oxford English Dictionary in 1870. Edward began to imagine crowdsourcing icons and symbols from volunteer designers around the world.
Then Edward got laid off during the recession, which turned out to be a huge catalyst. He decided to give his idea a go, and in 2010 Edward and Sofya launched the Noun Project with a Kickstarter campaign, back when Kickstarter was in its infancy.1 They thought it’d be a good way to introduce the global web community to their idea. Their goal was to raise $1,500, but in twenty days they got over $14,000. They realized their idea had the potential to be something much bigger.
They created a platform where symbols and icons could be uploaded, and Edward began recruiting talented designers to contribute their designs, a process he describes as a relatively easy sell. Lots of designers have old drawings just gathering “digital dust” on their hard drives. It’s easy to convince them to finally share them with the world.
The Noun Project currently has about seven thousand designers from around the world. But not all submissions are accepted. The Noun Project’s quality-review process means that only the best works become part of its collection. They make sure to provide encouraging, constructive feedback whenever they reject a piece of work, which maintains and builds the relationship they have with their global community of designers.
Creative Commons is an integral part of the Noun Project’s business model; this decision was inspired by Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of Radical Price, which introduced Edward to the idea that you could build a business model around free content.
Edward knew he wanted to offer a free visual language while still providing some protection and reward for its contributors. There is a tension between those two goals, but for Edward, Creative Commons licenses bring this idealism and business opportunity together elegantly. He chose the Attribution (CC BY) license, which means people can download the icons for free and modify them and even use them commercially. The requirement to give attribution to the original creator ensures that the creator can build a reputation and get global recognition for their work. And if they simply want to offer an icon that people can use without having to give credit, they can use CC0 to put the work into the public domain.
Noun Project’s business model and means of generating revenue have evolved significantly over time. Their initial plan was to sell T-shirts with the icons on it, which in retrospect Edward says was a horrible idea. They did get a lot of email from people saying they loved the icons but asking if they could pay a fee instead of giving attribution. Ad agencies (among others) wanted to keep marketing and presentation materials clean and free of attribution statements. For Edward, “That’s when our lightbulb went off.”
They asked their global network of designers whether they’d be open to receiving modest remuneration instead of attribution. Designers saw it as a win-win. The idea that you could offer your designs for free and have a global audience and maybe even make some money was pretty exciting for most designers.
The Noun Project first adopted a model whereby using an icon without giving attribution would cost $1.99 per icon. The model’s second iteration added a subscription component, where there would be a monthly fee to access a certain number of icons — ten, fifty, a hundred, or five hundred. However, users didn’t like these hard-count options. They preferred to try out many similar icons to see which worked best before eventually choosing the one they wanted to use. So the Noun Project moved to an unlimited model, whereby users have unlimited access to the whole library for a flat monthly fee. This service is called NounPro and costs $9.99 per month. Edward says this model is working well — good for customers, good for creators, and good for the platform.
Customers then began asking for an application-programming interface (API), which would allow Noun Project icons and symbols to be directly accessed from within other applications. Edward knew that the icons and symbols would be valuable in a lot of different contexts and that they couldn’t possibly know all of them in advance, so they built an API with a lot of flexibility. Knowing that most API applications would want to use the icons without giving attribution, the API was built with the aim of charging for its use. You can use what’s called the “Playground API” for free to test how it integrates with your application, but full implementation will require you to purchase the API Pro version.
The Noun Project shares revenue with its international designers. For one-off purchases, the revenue is split 70 percent to the designer and 30 percent to Noun Project.
The revenue from premium purchases (the subscription and API options) is split a little differently. At the end of each month, the total revenue from subscriptions is divided by Noun Project’s total number of downloads, resulting in a rate per download — for example, it could be $0.13 per download for that month. For each download, the revenue is split 40 percent to the designer and 60 percent to the Noun Project. (For API usage, it’s per use instead of per download.) Noun Project’s share is higher this time as it’s providing more service to the user.
The Noun Project tries to be completely transparent about their royalty structure.2 They tend to over communicate with creators about it because building trust is the top
priority.
For most creators, contributing to the Noun Project is not a full-time job but something they do on the side. Edward categorizes monthly earnings for creators into three broad categories: enough money to buy beer; enough to pay the bills; and most successful of all, enough to pay the rent.
Recently the Noun Project launched a new app called Lingo. Designers can use Lingo to organize not just their Noun Project icons and symbols but also their photos, illustrations, UX designs, et cetera. You simply drag any visual item directly into Lingo to save it. Lingo also works for teams so people can share visuals with each other and search across their combined collections. Lingo is free for personal use. A pro version for $9.99 per month lets you add guests. A team version for $49.95 per month allows up to twenty-five team members to collaborate, and to view, use, edit, and add new assets to each other’s collections. And if you subscribe to NounPro, you can access Noun Project from within Lingo.
The Noun Project gives a ton of value away for free. A very large percentage of their roughly one million members have a free account, but there are still lots of paid accounts coming from digital designers, advertising and design agencies, educators, and others who need to communicate ideas visually.
For Edward, “creating, sharing, and celebrating the world’s visual language” is the most important aspect of what they do; it’s their stated mission. It differentiates them from others who offer graphics, icons, or clip art.
Noun Project creators agree. When surveyed on why they participate in the Noun Project, this is how designers rank their reasons: 1) to support the Noun Project mission, 2) to promote their own personal brand, and 3) to generate money. It’s striking to see that money comes third, and mission, first. If you want to engage a global network of contributors, it’s important to have a mission beyond making money.
In Edward’s view, Creative Commons is central to their mission of sharing and social good. Using Creative Commons makes the Noun Project’s mission genuine and has generated a lot of their initial traction and credibility. CC comes with a built-in community of users and fans.
Edward told us, “Don’t underestimate the power of a passionate community around your product or your business. They are going to go to bat for you when you’re getting ripped in the media. If you go down the road of choosing to work with Creative Commons, you’re taking the first step to building a great community and tapping into a really awesome community that comes with it. But you need to continue to foster that community through other initiatives and continue to nurture it.”
The Noun Project nurtures their creators’ second motivation — promoting a personal brand — by connecting every icon and symbol to the creator’s name and profile page; each profile features their full collection. Users can also search the icons by the creator’s name.
The Noun Project also builds community through Iconathons — hackathons for icons.2 In partnership with a sponsoring organization, the Noun Project comes up with a theme (e.g., sustainable energy, food bank, guerrilla gardening, human rights) and a list of icons that are needed, which designers are invited to create at the event. The results are vectorized, and added to the Noun Project using CC0 so they can be used by anyone for free.
Providing a free version of their product that satisfies a lot of their customers’ needs has actually enabled the Noun Project to build the paid version, using a service-oriented model.
The Noun Project’s success lies in creating services and content that are a strategic mix of free and paid while staying true to their mission — creating, sharing, and celebrating the world’s visual language. Integrating Creative Commons into their model has been key to that goal.
Web links
- www.kickstarter.com/projects/tnp/building-a-free-collection-of-our-worlds-visual-sy/description
- thenounproject.com/handbook/royalties/#getting_paid
- thenounproject.com/iconathon/
