African Icon Library — drawing everyday African life properly
Most mainstream icon libraries are very good at depicting a generic digital world and considerably worse at depicting the places, objects, clothing, food and routines familiar across African life. I started African Icon Library to make those references easier for designers to find and use.
The gap in the default visual vocabulary
Designers working on African products routinely reach for the same global icon libraries. They cover the conventions of digital interfaces well, but many of the references that make African contexts recognisable are missing: local transport, food, clothing, market objects, household items and everyday routines.
That absence looks small until it repeats across products. Teams either substitute a generic symbol, redraw something from scratch or leave the idea out altogether. The result is a visual language that can be technically clear while still feeling detached from the world the product is meant to describe.
Build the references that were missing
I built African Icon Library around those missing references rather than around another set of universal interface symbols. The subjects come from people, places, objects and everyday life, with the aim of making familiar African references available as ordinary design material rather than as special illustrations a team has to commission each time.
The design challenge was not simply drawing recognisable objects. Each icon still had to work at interface scale, sit comfortably beside the rest of the set and remain useful outside the exact reference image that inspired it. That pushed the work toward a reusable visual vocabulary rather than a collection of one-off drawings.
Treat it as a library, not a gallery
The project is open-source because the useful outcome is not a portfolio of illustrations; it is a set other designers can actually use. Organising the work as a library makes the references easier to browse, reuse and extend across products instead of leaving them trapped inside one project.
That also changes how I judge the work. A strong icon is not just visually distinctive on its own. It needs to remain legible, consistent with neighbouring icons and specific enough to carry the cultural reference without turning the entire interface into decoration.
What the project is really about
African Icon Library is ultimately an argument about design infrastructure: the tools designers inherit shape what becomes easy to represent. Expanding that infrastructure with references drawn from African life makes it easier to design products that describe their users’ world without treating those references as exceptions.
