Studio initiative — Open source
African Icon Library
Icon Design · Design Systems · Open-Source Tooling
- 32
- Released icons, across 7 of 9 categories.
- 1
- Weight drawn — regular. Thin, bold and fill are specified, not drawn.
- 24
- Pixel grid every drawing is built, validated and judged against.
- MIT
- Licence, covering the code, the metadata and the drawings.
Outcome
An icon system for African life, rebuilt from the grid up — a danfo, a suya skewer, a talking drum, an agogo, a naira note, a jerry can — and a public record of everything still to be drawn.
- Danfo
- Okada
- Suya
- Talking drum
- Agogo
- Naira note
- POS terminal
- Jerry can
Eight of the thirty-two released drawings, in the only weight that exists today.
Challenge
An August 2026 audit reviewed 86 existing drawings and found two visual species inside one library: no shared grid, no stroke logic, type and trademarks baked into the artwork, duplicate concepts, and 38 files still named "Group-N".
Approach
Rebuild rather than repaint. One 24-pixel grid, one stroke logic, and a validator that runs in CI against every asset — viewBox, live area, colour, permitted elements, metadata coverage. Automated rules cannot judge recognition, so a person also looks at every drawing small.
Deliverables
Canonical SVG assets, typed metadata with shared search, a generated React component per icon, a Figma plugin that is offline by declaration and by build, and a website — one public repository, open from the first commit.
Restraint
One drawing is held back because a Nigerian reviewer has not yet confirmed what the object is. Seven more were drawn to the grid, passed every automated rule, and were cut because they did not read as the thing they claimed to be: a gele became an umbrella, a generator became a boombox.
What it does not claim, yet.
A library is only as trustworthy as the things it refuses to overstate. This is the list the project publishes about itself.
Three weights are specified, not drawn
Thin, bold and fill exist in the system and nowhere else. A weight redistributes mass and re-solves counters — that is icon design, not a build step, and it will not be faked by changing stroke-width.
Nothing is published to npm or Figma Community
The packages build and the plugin runs. Publishing is an account action on a release checklist, and it has not happened yet.
The library site is not deployed
icons.neustackstudio.com is where the library will live. Until it ships, the repository is the source of truth.
Nigeria first, not a continent
The released set is drawn from Nigerian life. Expansion is the roadmap, and a region-tagging convention has to be settled before the first non-Nigerian icon ships.
Where it lives
The library’s intended home. Not deployed yet, so this is not a link — until it is, the repository is the source of truth.
Need a system that holds up this closely?
Request a studio review