In the spirit of celebrating and sharing, enjoy 20% off at the Noun Store today through Wednesday.  Use code 1YEARNOUNS at checkout.

The Noun Project was born one year ago with some generous funding from our Kickstarter supporters.  We launched the collection as a free library of downloadable symbols made mostly of the National Park Services, AIGA, and Universal Health Care public domain symbols. Today, that library has expanded to include more than 800 symbols created by our designers, collaborators, and - most excitingly - by users from around the world. It is no longer just a library. It’s also a workshop, where concepts are visualized and shared freely. It’s a new way of thinking where language is seen, not spoken.

A few months after our launch in December of 2010, we asked volunteers to translate The Noun Project into different languages. The response was overwhelming. In just a few minutes, the entire library was translated into French and Spanish.  A few days later, the entire library was available in German, Japanese and Russian. Today, it is available in twenty-five languages. This accomplishment, and many others, was realized by the users. 

During the summer months we proudly collaborated with Code for America in hosting design charettes to create new civic minded symbols across topics like Health & Nutrition, Democracy, Education, and Transportation.  Forty new symbols were added to the public domain with the help of hundreds of volunteers across America.

Recently we introduced the Noun Store as a means of supporting further development of The Noun Project. Working with high-quality manufacturers, we reintroduced symbols as a way of personal expression.  Users can combine up to three symbols to create their own iconic T-shirts that share their ideas with the world, whether it’s “Ideas Power Revolutions”, “Human Rights” or “Down with Alarm Clocks”.  Personal expression is also possible through custom iPhone Cases featuring any symbol from the collection, and with our curated selection of Button Packs.

It’s been exciting to see many of the symbols from the collection in use, and in very different ways.  Individuals have relied on the site to help them create everything from movie posters to short films, presentations, Boston Globe’s newspaper illustrations to infographics.  What’s been most inspiring though is talking with teachers and parents of kids with learning disabilities, who use our symbols to assist in overcoming communication challenges, especially in children with autism.  The Occupy Wallstreet protesters have also recently taken a liking to our protest symbol.

From the start this project has been about collaboration. We brought The Noun Project to life with the support of our Kickstarter backers. We made the site international with the help from our volunteers. And now, we’re broadening the world’s visual language with a global community. The arrival of Submissions has revolutionized the site. We are not only storing icons, but we’re changing the way they’re made and used. The icons created by the public represent the ideas we wish to see in the world - ideas like Urban Farm, Peaceful Protest and Human Rights. They’re indicators not just of a concept, but of a hope. The communicative power isn’t just utilitarian anymore. It’s social. 

Thank you to everyone who has made this all possible.

As we open the virtual doors of the Noun Store, we’re proud to introduce the stories behind the products we’re carrying.

NounShirts by Hozell

You may already own one of these shirts from our Kickstarter days, and if so, you know first hand just how comfortable they are!  

Our NounShirts are made by Hozell, a small shop started by two gents in California who were tired of boxy, ill-fitting shirts with sleeves that stretched out and bodies that lost shape (in their own words).  They now make their own well fitted shirts that are carried in stores such as Barneys New York and Tokyo, Fred Segal and Kitson. 

The shirts are made in small batches, with limited production and distribution, out of 100% cotton fabric that is washed using certified organic dyes.  Each shirt is hand finished with distinctive design details such as contrast stitching on the shoulders.  Once an order is placed, the symbols are individually printed on each shirt using water based inks for a soft-hand feel.

One of the things we love about Hozell is that they make their clothes locally in Southern California.  They source the fabric from domestic mills around downtown Los Angeles, get the shirts cut and sewn by folks in Orange County, and have them washed and dyed at a dye house in South Central.  Just about everything is made within a 30 minute drive of the Pacific Ocean.  

Do you want to see just how our NounShirts are made? 

Video directed by Matthew Smith

Button Packs by Busy Beaver

The Busy Beaver Button Company came to be when its founder, Christen Carter, spent a semester abroad in England in 1995. She saw the popularity of one-inch badges (as they’re called in the Queen’s English) in the London music scene and learned what she could of the button-making craft. With a manual press and the encouragement of her first customer, indie rock band Guided By Voices, the entrepreneurial expat returned to school in Indiana where she ran the burgeoning button business out of her college apartment. Initially known as The Li’l One-Inch Button Company, Busy Beaver found a new name and, in 1998, settled down in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood where the company now resides.

Since its humble beginnings Busy Beaver Button Company has gone from a one-woman operation to a company with fifteen employees. During its first fifteen years, the Busy Beaver crew has overseen over 50,000 designs and produced millions upon millions of buttons for clients like Missy Elliot, Bumble and Bumble, Adidas, and Burger King.  They’re also the proud owners of the world’s first Button Museum, which showcases notable buttons from the past century and is open to the general public at the Busy Beaver headquarters.

Busy Beaver prides itself on being an active member of the community, providing opportunities by supporting local non-profit Girls Rock Chicago, hosting button-making workshops at the Chicago Public Library and sponsoring a local high school robotics team. For its annual Button-O-Matic series, the company enlists the support of local artists and like-minded businesses to create limited runs of wearable art. 

The company is also a model of eco-efficiency, from its geothermal heated headquarters to the recycled Gary steel used in each button. 

iPhone Cases by Uncommon

Uncommon was founded in 2009 on the desire to foster an artistic community around exceptionally well-designed products.  They have developed a proprietary 3D TATT™ (Thermo-Active Transdermal Technology™) process that ensures durable, long-lasting, high resolution imprints on every phone case.   This process embeds the image deep into the case, so there’s never any peeling or fading.  They use a slim case made of premium impact-resistant polymers to safeguard your iPhone.  The case also features an anti-glare camera ring, and allows for direct access to all of your phone’s features. The slick design of this case is worthy of your iPhone, and is sold by Apple.

We can’t wait to carry their upcoming iPad Deflector case!

We’ve received several requests over the past few months for advice on how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign.  Although we don’t think there’s any one formula that everyone can follow, we do have some advice about what’s worked well for us during our Kickstarter campaign.

Before Launching Our Campaign

We were planning our site for months, going through all the details of the layout, content, mission, and what the possible uses could be. We had this great idea we wanted to share with other design enthusiasts, but didn’t know how to most effectively tell people about it.  The idea to launch a Kickstarter campaign came about randomly.  We were discussing how our partner, SimpleScott, successfully funded his book “Designing Obama” through Kickstarter, and it occurred to us that this would be the perfect platform to showcase our idea to people who love art & design and support new creative ventures. 

The challenge was that we were already in November, and the holiday season was right around the corner.  We knew it would be nearly impossible to raise funding right after the holidays, so in order to launch our campaign before the holiday season we had to do so in 3 weeks.  This created pressure to very quickly decide on all the elements of the campaign, including how much funding we needed, what reward levels to assign, what to offer as a reward for contributing, as well as to finish and launch our website, and create one of those amazing videos we’ve seen on other successful Kickstarter projects.  Therefore, our first piece of advice to anyone wanting to do a Kickstarter campaign is to plan ahead.  The more time you have to prepare your idea/product, to plan your campaign, rewards, and marketing, the bigger the chances that you will create something that actually appeals to your target audience and your message will be able to reach your potential supporters.

The Importance of a Video

One thing never to underestimate when launching a Kickstarter campaign is the importance of a good video.  Do some research by watching the videos of successful campaigns, particularly those that are within the same category (art, film, design, technology, etc.) as the one you want to target.  You will quickly notice that most of the successful campaigns have more or less professional quality videos that introduce you to the idea and the person/people behind them.  The dialogue is well thought out, and the creator does a thorough job of explaining the product, why someone should get involved, and how the backer will benefit through supporting (their reward).  But most importantly, videos create a level of trust and rapport that’s difficult to establish through just text and images. 

Living in Los Angeles, we were lucky enough to know someone in the film industry.  We talked one of our great friends into giving up his Saturday (and his apartment) in order to shoot our video using the equipment he had.  We worked for days to prepare the script.  It’s incredibly difficult to fully explain and convey your idea in a limited amount of time (usually just 2-3 minutes.)  But no one wants to sit through a long video of someone going on-and-on about their idea.  Our motto has always been “Keep It Simple”, so we tried to talk to the audience like we were talking to our friends, and to explain the idea behind our site in the clearest way possible.

In order to demonstrate how our backers could select different symbols to create their own messages on the NounShirts we offered as a thank you, we turned to a friend at San Francisco’s Bars+Tone to help with the graphics.   Creating this video gave us a whole new appreciation for video production….it took us about 4 hours (and some shots of whiskey) to shoot a 2 minute video. 

You can find more pictures from the photoshoot here, and our final video can be seen below:

Campaign Marketing

One of the most important aspects of running a successful Kickstarter campaign is pushing your own marketing.  Before launching our campaign, we created a marketing timeline of when and how often we would tweet, post on Facebook, email friends and family, and contact design blogs and people in the industry.  We also created a list of our “social connectors” – people in our social circle who were prominent in the fields relevant to our campaign - such as technology, design, and marketing.  A couple days before the campaign, we sent a separate email to the social connectors with detailed information about our mission, the campaign we were launching, and sample tweets/posts they could write.  A great reference book we recommend about marketing is “The Tipping Point” by Malcom Gladwell.  The book discusses what Gladwell refers to as “social epidemics”, one of which being the power of marketing through word-of-mouth.

Another important part of our campaign marketing plan was to identify a list of 40 design blogs/websites that we wanted to reach out to in the hopes that they would write about us to their followers.  Before launching, we created a spreadsheet of these sites and their contacts, and throughout the campaign we tracked when we contacted someone and whether or not they got back to us.  From researching other successful Kickstarter campaigns, we knew that most traffic and funds are generated during the beginning and the end of a campaign, with a lull in the middle.  Since our campaign was only 3 weeks long, our goal was to create enough buzz to drive up traffic during that middle week.  Therefore, we started to contact the blogs/websites during the first week to give them enough time to hopefully feature us in the upcoming days.

It’s difficult to say whether it was our efforts or just plain luck, but towards the end of our first week we started to receive amazing coverage by media we haven’t even contacted.  In the same day that we were published on Kickstarter’s “New & Noteworthy” feature and their “Project of the Day”, we also got picked up by NotCot, TechCrunch and Coudal Partners.  The next few days were a whirlwind of excitement of getting covered by FastCo Design, Engadget, PSFK, and Big Think.  I believe that was when our server temporarily crashed.  Soon after the end of our Kickstarter campaign, we were also mentioned by SwissMiss, The Atlantic, and Smashing Magazine, among others.

The following graph demonstrates the relationship between received media coverage, our traffic numbers, and the contributions we received during the 3 weeks of our campaign:

Rewarding Your Supporters

We offered six levels of support to our backers, from $5 to $105.   Our most successful by far was the $30 level, which was the first level at which a supporter would receive a NounShirt.  The next level up was $45, which offered a custom-made NounShirt designed through a collaborative process with the backer.  We limited this level to 25 backers due to the substantial time commitment it takes to design custom orders (it sold out quickly).  We also received funding from donors who selected no rewards, with two of those donations being over $100. 

Here’s how the reward levels corresponded to the total amount of pledges and to the total final revenue:

Other Recommendations

People want to know what’s going on.  If you have something new or exciting to share with your supporters, by all means let them know.  They want to know their money is going to good use.  For example, we felt it was important to keep our supporters up to date with information about the progress of the website, major media coverage, and also the status of their NounShirts.  It took us a while to collect everyone’s information for their NounShirts, so we wanted to keep the communication going to make sure people knew we were trying to get everyone’s responses back as quickly as possible.  We’ve posted a total of 10 updates, three of them throughout the campaign.  We probably should have posted more, but since we personally don’t like being bombarded with emails, we tried to only send them when we had something valuable to add.

When calculating how much funding to request, remember to include the 5% Kickstarter fees, 3% Amazon fees, as well as any applicable shipping charges you may incur.  Also don’t forget to take into account any potential international shipping fees.  We didn’t request additional contributions for international shipping because we assumed this would only account for a small percentage of our total contributions, but after the campaign ended we found that nearly 1/3 of our reward-fulfillment needed to be shipped internationally.

And last but not least, keep in mind that whether or not your funding goal is met, Kickstarter offers an invaluable service for you to 1. get your idea heard, and 2. to get feedback about your idea.  We received a lot of great suggestions from our supporters, and we listened carefully to their comments.  Companies pay a lot of money for focus groups and specialists to conduct customer surveys.  All of this information is available to you for free just by listening to your backer’s feedback.  

We’re very grateful for Kickstarter and their team for all of their great work!