How I Made $20,000 from The Noun Project
Last month, I received an email from The Noun Project, letting me know that they had sent me $196.19 for selling my icons. Even though it seems like a small amount, roughly 10,000 or more people thought my icons were valuable enough to purchase or download them. I’m a huge fan of passive sources of income, along with the regular income from working for a company.
I’ve been a part of the Noun Project since 2013 and have designed more than 2,000 icons and made close to $20,000 with millions of downloads.
What is The Noun Project?
The Noun Project is a website that aggregates and catalogs symbols that are created and uploaded by graphic designers around the world — Wikipedia.
Anyone can create and submit icons(SVGs) to Noun Project to start generating passive income or monthly royalties. All icons can be downloaded in 2 formats — either Pro Downloads with payment or basic download, which are free and have to attribute the creator.
My journey of Noun Project started by accident. A few years ago, I wasn’t able to find an icon on Noun Project, so I decided to create and upload one so that it can help others.
And after a couple of months, I got a Paypal credit. I was surprised to see that it was sent by the Noun Project. When I logged into the platform and checked my royalty section, I got to know that my icon had been downloaded more than 25,000 times.
I have been in love with the platform since then. I appreciate the UX of the simple and minimal approach it has while allowing new/existing graphic/UI designers to generate passive income. I urge all the designers out there to spend some time to create a couple of icons to upload to Noun and experience what I’ve.
I want to share the tips and good practices that worked for me, so anyone can do it. I’m going to skip the baby steps of how to create icons or its guidelines, which you can easily find in the FAQs of The Noun Project, and stick to more tangible and lesser-known tips that I followed.
The Mindset Required
A lot of what has kept me designing icons over the last years has been the idea of challenging myself by publishing new icons to improve my craft and to cultivate my design practice. With a positive attitude and the right process, results come much easier.
The process of mastery
Everyone has a process on how they do something, and this is the specific one I cultivated after a lot of trial and error.
Be yourself
It was tempting when I started creating and uploading icons to The Noun Project to try and generate money quickly. The fascination was to be a designer who has thousands of icons to create tens and thousands of royalties from it.
It is not about you
Design icons for the audience. People download your icons to fit in the designs they’ve in mind already. It’s not about you; it’s about the end-user.
Whenever you are designing an icon, ask yourself, “ Why will a user download this icon? For what purpose? What quality or style are they looking for? “ If the answer is no, then your intentions may be selfish. It’s an easy problem to solve by focusing in on one of these outcomes.
Design frequently
If you want to grow your monthly royalty continually, you need to learn to design and upload icons consistently.
The single biggest factor that led me to the results I later got was to design frequently. I started by creating ten icons every day. Now, because of the daily work at the place I work, I still manage to design icons and upload them once a week.
When I started on Noun Project, I published 20 icons a day, which helped me reach the number of downloads quickly. I tried to create icons for many different needs/requirements so that if someone searches for any keyword, they should be able to see my icons.
Designing consistently helped me in the following ways:
- It helped me understand what people need
- It allowed me to explore different icons style
- It perfected the way I designed icons
- It helped me in creating a passive income
Real scenarios
The icons which get downloaded on Noun Project, from my observation, are the ones that are used the most in the Mobile apps being built today. When a designer already has a design in mind, they will visit the site to download the icons which match with their design.
Designing Icons: The process, the do’s and don’ts
Icons are the visual language of the world.
Style
Icons are the visual language of the world. Today we notice a few leading trends in icons — flat, outline, skeuomorphism, neumorphism, 3D, minimal, and illustrative. The trend is to design and simplify icons and return to the roots of pictograms, which can be easily understood by anyone.
Level of detail
Less is more. The next step is to select the appropriate level of detail. Too little can negatively affect, and too many are distracting. The visibility of enough elements in the icon is a key ingredient to get the proper recognition. Icons can be abstract in nature (e.g., menu, direction) and when dealing with an object, can use realism (e.g., search, profile)
Scale
Designing for random size is a bad idea. Multiple blogs can educate you on this. The Noun Project 100px works excellent for the SVGs.
Cohesive
Icons undoubtedly need to look and work together as one cohesive whole. The best way to do it is to select a combination of properties/elements which the style of the icons will follow. Remember to use the same style throughout the entire set. But I work on icons that are independent of each other. So follow what works the best for you.
Check out the technical guidelines to create icons for The Noun Project
Getting paid to design: Be patient
This one is unpopular, and it’s worth mentioning. You won’t make money on Noun Project overnight, but in a month or two with a couple of good icons, Yes!
Like any pursuit in life, you have to be patient.
What’s the point of designing if you don’t love it? Loving what I do is what eventually led me to make money, not the other way around.
You can check my profile at The Noun Project here and give some feedback on how I can improve my style too, and get inspired!
