The Icons project starts with Flatland as both shared text and constraint: a two-dimensional world that sets our visual grammar — clean, legible shapes drawn as minimal SVG paths. It’s a practical way to keep files tiny and edges crisp, and a narrative cue for how we build together. See Icons & Scenes.
In small workgroups (Writers Rooms) we extend scenes into fresh storylines and mint the visuals that carry them. **Icons** handle functional moves; **scene sketches** capture mood and place. Together they travel well across sites and stories. More on that split in Scene Sketches and the shared vocabulary in Story Glyphs.
Each icon gets its own page with the raw SVG inline, so people can review and improve it, and software can fetch it directly. The page also holds the short definition that makes the icon portable—meaning that moves with the link. See the pattern in Icon Page and the rationale in Portable Meaning.
This is federated, not consensus. You run your own site, name your own beats, and press Fork when you want to adopt or adapt someone else’s work —credit and provenance intact. See Fork is the new like.
Non-linear routes through a tale show up as light, linkable Story maps, where glyphs mark who’s in the scene, what kind of move is happening, what set or prop matters, and which “spell” (a small bit of software behavior) is invoked.
The loop is simple: stories produce icons; icons clarify practice; practice becomes guides; guides become software; and the results feed new stories. Everything stays permissively licensed, forkable, and projection-ready. If you want a quick way to start, copy the pattern in Beat Page Template and compare with Example Beat Page.
# See - Beat Page Template - Icons & Scenes - Icons as Buttons - Icons as Archive