Illustrate Your Day: An Intro to Symbol Design

Edward Boatman, co-founder of the Noun Project, built this course around a deceptively simple idea: illustrate your own day, one symbol at a time, until you have a 20-icon timeline that reads like a visual diary. It is a smart structural choice. Instead of practicing icon design on arbitrary prompts, students design symbols for things that already matter to them, a commute, a coffee ritual, a bedtime routine, which keeps motivation high across five short units.

From brainstorm to symbol theory

The first unit is pure editorial work with no software involved. Students list every step of a normal day (Boatman's own example runs to 35 items), then cut that list down to the 20 "referents" that are most significant and most visually communicable. It is a useful constraint-based exercise, forcing early decisions about what actually deserves a symbol before any drawing starts.

The second unit is the course's strongest material. Rather than asserting design opinions, Boatman walks through an actual usability study, a set of hospital symbols tested by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with non-designer volunteers rating comprehension. He uses the study's real winners and losers to explain two design techniques: iconic (a single bold object, like an eye for ophthalmology) and narrative (a small scene, like a doctor examining a patient's eye). The genetics and mental-health examples, where a literal metaphor tested poorly against a more direct symbol, make the point concretely rather than abstractly. This section alone justifies the class for anyone who designs icons, logos, or infographics and has never thought rigorously about why some symbols read instantly and others don't.

The Illustrator mechanics

Units three and four shift into software. The crash course covers the pen and line tools, stroke weight, the Pathfinder panel's unite and subtract functions, grids with snap-to-grid, and the outline-stroke command that converts a line into a fillable shape. It is genuinely beginner-friendly, the kind of tutorial that assumes zero prior Illustrator knowledge and explains keyboard shortcuts as it goes. Boatman's method for building a symbol, tracing a reference photo, breaking a complex shape into overlapping circles and rectangles, then subtracting and merging, is a technique worth internalizing beyond this one project.

Where the course thins out is in that same technical stretch. The tracing demonstrations run long and repetitive, and viewers already comfortable with basic vector tools will find little new after the first Pathfinder subtraction. The final unit, cleaning up anchor points and exporting a finished symbol as an SVG for upload to the Noun Project marketplace, is useful but brief, more a wrap-up than a deep polish lesson.

At 87 minutes across five units, this sits closer to a focused workshop than a comprehensive Illustrator course. It won't turn anyone into an advanced vector artist, but it succeeds at its actual goal: teaching the specific mental discipline of symbol design, backed by real evidence, and giving a beginner enough Illustrator fluency to execute on it. The daily-timeline project format makes the practice stick in a way generic icon exercises rarely do.

What you will learn

• ·How to sort a brainstormed list of daily activities down to 20 meaningful referents worth illustrating
• ·The difference between iconic and narrative symbol design techniques, backed by real user-comprehension test data
• ·Core Illustrator mechanics: pen and line tools, the Pathfinder panel (unite, minus front), outline stroke, grids and snapping
• ·A repeatable process for tracing a photo reference into a simplified vector shape
• ·How to clean up anchor points and unify strokes into filled paths for a finished icon set
• ·How to size and export an icon as an SVG for submission to a stock icon marketplace