Lessons from the Cisco Icon Set

Photo by Nic Wood: https://www.pexels.com/photo/bright-microchip-with-red-light-6432056/

In slide:ology, a book that deserves its own post, Nancy Duarte writes that Cisco, the computer systems company, created a set of icons in the 1980s for describing server relationships, and intentionally made these icons available to everyone. According to Duarte, this was on purpose. The intention was for Cisco’s icons to be the universal icons that people used to conceptualize server relationships.

I was unable to confirm this online. In a thread on Reddit, some people seemed to think that Cisco had “first mover advantage” or that people just “ended up” using these icons almost universally.

But Cisco could have kept its icons proprietary, or tried to, so that they wouldn’t “end up” being the default icons. There could be a business case to do it that way—not sharing their icons would create more work for others, and perhaps make it more difficult for competitors to communicate about their work.

So, clearly, there was at least some sort of decision to make the icons public. And these icons did largely become the universal icons people use to conceptualize server relationships, even today.

How is this relevant for those of us who don’t work in IT?

Imagine creating images in line with your understanding of the world, images that look exactly how you want them to look, and these images become the generic images that people use to talk about this topic.

That’s powerful.

And it’s something that many of us don’t have.

We live in a world where cis white men are the default, and our iconography reflects this. We have the generic yellow smileys, the use of a bow or dress added to a “regular” icon to symbolize femaleness, the icon pictures that are either men or women.

If you designed an icon set from scratch to diagram something important about your world, what would it look like?

How would it differ from the standard icons available?

What new thoughts would you think, write, or diagram if you had this icon set?