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Freebie: Adinkra Sans (50 sim­pli­fied vector icons)

Short story

Download Adinkra Sans – 50 icon pack in SVG and PNG: designed for any graphic project, per­sonal or commercial.

Wait. Any project?

Ah, you caught that. We went for adapt­abil­ity, not heritage.

What! Why?

Mm. Long story.

Symmetry reflects royalty. 

The orig­i­nal adinkra arti­sans had to wres­tle with ink and stamp blocks, a very quirky medium. Straight lines were hard, but every step of draw­ing, carv­ing and print­ing cir­cles brought its own headache… So nat­u­rally they put curves on every other icon! These people flexed the dif­fi­culty. (In our era, they’d prob­a­bly be pixel-per­fect gurus.)

This his­tory is baked into every adinkra icon, and that’s a very good thing. However, one might argue that the artists weren’t aiming for this tex­ture, any more than video gaming pio­neers were pre­sent­ing 8‑bit as an ideal res­o­lu­tion. One might ask why these leg­ends made a series of con­cen­tric cir­cles the ‘king’ of their set, and follow that ques­tion to its dig­i­tal extreme…

I love pixel art, by the way. And I appre­ci­ate adinkra’s organic feel; that was a big focus for my first icon pack. But while research­ing that, I made 12 super-modern icons, which was a lot of fun. That led me to wonder how the her­itage would trans­late in a sans-serif-friendly con­text. (It’s not just me, right? The clas­sic ones are quite serif-biased.)

Right? And I don’t even love this new Gye Nyame. It only looks weird on its own, though. The pack is opti­mized for pat­terns and typo­graphic orna­ment, so each icon sac­ri­fices some unique­ness for the har­mony of the set. When you need a visual anchor, I’d always advise cus­tomiz­ing – but either v1 or v2 can get you started.

Long story over. Specimens!

Get Adinkra Sans (and the orig­i­nal v1.0, why not). Hope you love them and never have to trace these icons again. (Unless, like me, you actu­ally kind of want to. In which case: stay fab­u­lous, platypus.)

BTW: Pretty sure a v2.1 release will be needed, so I’d really appre­ci­ate any feed­back on improvements.

Credits

Adinkra research:

Next page: License details: →

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