The Icons project is both a story telling device, **and** a focused effort to build a high-quality, openly licensed library of small, precise SVG icons. On this page we make a start in describing teh functional aspect of the project as a federated archive of svg icons.
These icons can be referenced directly from Federated Wiki pages and used in applications. Each icon has its own wiki page that explains what the icon means, shows it at multiple scales, and provides the raw SVG so software can fetch and use it without additional packaging.
The project takes Flatland as its design reference and narrative frame. Flatland’s two-dimensional world is a useful constraint: icons are drawn as clean, scalable shapes described by a single `path` wherever possible.
This keeps files small, rendering fast, and edges crisp on screens from phones to projectors. The Flatland theme also provides a consistent visual logic—simple geometry, readable silhouettes, and minimal detail.
An icon page serves both humans and software. For people, the page presents the icon clearly, explains its intended use, and shows legible previews at common sizes. For software, the page hosts the SVG inline so a tool can retrieve the page’s JSON, extract the SVG, and drop it into a build or runtime asset pipeline.
In related demos, an icon plus a small block of wiki-code functions as a reusable spell, making it easy to script how an icon is displayed or transformed.
The initial scope prioritizes pragmatic application icons—especially those needed for Git-centric workflows (e.g., pull, branch, merge, add, stage)—and other common UI actions. Visual quality is treated as a first-order requirement. Icons should look good at 20–24 px in a toolbar and remain stable and elegant when scaled up for talks, tutorials, and classroom projection.
Licensing is simple and permissive. Where existing work fits the project’s standards, we draw from MIT/ISC/Apache-licensed sets and attribute appropriately. Where gaps exist, we create new icons in the same minimal style and publish them under permissive terms. The long-term goal is a well-curated subset that covers real needs for teaching, research, and app development.
Community participation is built in. Contributors can propose new icons, improve descriptions, refine geometry, and add usage notes—all through ordinary wiki edits. The bar for inclusion is clarity, consistency with the Flatland-style guidelines, and technical quality of the SVG.
In short, the Icons project offers a reliable, federated source of small, elegant, and easily consumable SVGs—grounded in a clear design philosophy—so that educators, students, and developers can speak a shared visual language across pages, prototypes, and production apps.
# See - Beat Page Template - Icons & Scenes - Icons as Buttons - Icons as Archive