Health Icons: an open-source set of 630+ symbols for universal healthcare talk

Burka, director of product and design at health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, kept meeting suspect iconography in public health tools and wanted a big library to replace them.

Burka drew the first 12 icons himself — hypertension, blood monitors, pinprick machines used by diabetes patients in India — then recruited on Twitter; within three weeks 20+ contributors including Yugandhar Bhamare (Mumbai), Julia Parchimowicz (Poland) and Dr. Greg Schmidt (Ottawa) built a database of more than 630 icons at healthicons.org.

An open-source database of 630+ icons covering blood types, sex workers, diagnostic tests and more, free to use, with Burka as creative director ensuring every symbol looks part of the same family.

Fast Company reported on June 17, 2021 on Health Icons, an open-source set of universal healthcare symbols started by designer Daniel Burka, director of product and design at the health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. The inspiration was COVID-19's communication gap — signs in Spanish, English and Mandarin, directives changing weekly, and patients in countries like India and Nigeria struggling to describe symptoms to doctors via text.

Burka started selfishly, drawing icons closest to his day job — hypertension, a blood monitor, a pinprick machine, things commonly used in India by people with diabetes; an icon of a person bending over and vomiting was among the first twelve. Realizing he needed help, he put out a call to designers on Twitter. Three weeks later, a team of more than 20 contributors — including designers Yugandhar Bhamare from Mumbai and Julia Parchimowicz from Poland, plus Dr. Greg Schmidt, volunteer chief medical officer from Ottawa — had created an open-source database of more than 630 icons.

The library covers symbols for different blood types, sex workers, diagnostic tests and beyond. Burka, who normally works on 'relatively sophisticated health software with places like the WHO and the National Heart Foundation in Bangladesh', served as creative director, ensuring the icons all looked like part of the same family — and relished shipping something important quickly, without the checks, balances and slow rollouts of institutional work.

The library is free and open-source, removing the licensing friction that keeps consistent iconography out of underfunded health tools.

Its scope is deliberately complete: symptoms, devices, and stigmatized subjects like sex work that commercial sets skip.

The speed story matters — three weeks from tweet to 630 icons is a rebuke to institutional design timelines Burka knows firsthand.

Open source can outrun institutional design cycles: a volunteer team shipped in three weeks what WHO-scale rollouts take years to approve, because the icons came with no gatekeeper.

As of June 2021 the database held more than 630 icons at healthicons.org, grown by a distributed volunteer team of designers and a volunteer chief medical officer.