Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium d͡ʒɛrmi Good

Originally published on blog.thenounproject.com

For more than six years, the Noun Project homepage has been guiding creatives of all disciplines in their quest for visual communication. As Noun Project’s platform has grown, the face of the product has mostly stayed the same. We felt it was time for a refresh to better show off the best content in a unified and simple way.

Since search is the core product of Noun Project, it was important for us to keep the searching simple and intuitive. In the update, we unified the search bar design across the entire product. We made it more responsive for different screen sizes and we found more vertical space on the page to make it a little larger.

With the additions to the search bar, we also needed to update the navigation. The old navigation has evolved over time from a few simple links, to a full set of products and features. By moving all navigation items into a drawer we had more space for hierarchy within the product as well as more room for the product to grow. Now from anywhere on the site, you can quickly get to any other part.

Showing off the best content

For years, we have loved showing off the newest icons on our homepage. But since Noun Project now gets thousands of submissions every day, we decided to showcase the best of the best on the homepage instead. Since people prefer to view a collection of icons rather than just one, we will now feature our favorite picks of collections right on the homepage as you scroll down the page. As our moderators find new and interesting submissions, they will add them to a growing list of the best icons.

A newly added section on nounproject.com homepage

Noun Project has the most diverse collection of iconography, and to showcase that we selected some of our favorite search terms such as “Bacteria,” “Activist,” and “Language.” This section was built to inspire people to search for more than what they are used to in icon sets.

Noun Project icon creators come from all over the world.

All those diverse icons are made by thousands of creators from just about every point of the globe. With such a strong creator community, we wanted a better place to show off some of our favorite creators. So we added an ever-growing list. The world starts to get a little smaller as you get to know the faces behind the icons.

Along with the growth of content, we’ve continued to iterate on the product. Letting our users know about new features hasn’t always been easy with our previous homepage. Which is why with our new homepage, we’ve built an expandable section that can be used to announce any new features we ship. We’ve also brought our recent blog posts about new icon uses and awesome projects we love to the homepage.

Overall we hope this refresh inspires people to get more creative and find new ways to visualize their ideas faster.

See for yourself at nounproject.com.

Noun Project Homepage Refresh was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Noun Project Homepage Refresh

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