Project history
Health Icons started in May 2021 and has since expanded into an international all-volunteer effort to provide health icons for projects around the world.
Origin story with DHIS2
In the spring of 2021, Daniel Burka was working with the DHIS2 software system as part of a large-scale hypertension control project in Nigeria. DHIS2 is a popular open source digital health tool used by governments in over 70 countries. DHIS2 has many admirable qualities, but back in 2021 the icons in its software were very inconsistent (see below).
DHIS2 had around 400 icons representing common themes in public health, education and climate change. Many were the commonsense icons you'd expect in health, like hospital, clinic and blood pressure monitor. But some were very specific concepts, like Rapid Diagnostic Testing Result Invalid, tied to particular uses of DHIS2 in pandemic response programs. Other examples include Cone Test on Nets and Discriminating Concentration Bioassays. If you've ever wondered why the collection includes a very specific icon, the answer is probably that it was in the original DHIS2 set.
The original DHIS2 icons were drawn at 48px because they were often used as descriptive symbols in the DHIS2 software and needed quite a bit of detail. Our first two years of Health Icons followed the same standard. We later created 24px icons that are a better match for popular icon sets like Google's Material Icons, Remix Icon and Feather.
Many of the icons originally created for DHIS2 have the tag "DHIS2", so you can find them by searching Health Icons for "DHIS2".
Health Icons were first included in DHIS2 in version 2.37, released in June 2021.
A volunteer effort starting in 2021
Daniel put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone wanted to help replace the DHIS2 icons. About a dozen designers jumped in, and we started redesigning the DHIS2 icons in Figma. At first, we didn't have a well-defined style guide and made up styles as we went. After a few weeks, we stopped and looked at what made a good "Health Icon" and set a few standards, like:
- A 2px stroke width
- Intentionally mixing round and sharp endcaps on strokes
- Cutouts in shapes to make them distinctive (e.g. Microscope)
After finishing the DHIS2 redesign, we expanded our work to include many other common health icons. At first, we made lists of common medical terms, devices, conditions and so on. Later, we added a way for the public to request icons (see below).
Since 2021, many contributors have come and gone. Some people contributed one or two icons, and several prolific contributors created dozens each. Dr. Greg Schmidt, an internal medicine doctor from Canada with global public health experience, has been our medical advisor, giving feedback as we create icons. We list most of the people who have contributed to Health Icons on our About page.
Choosing which icons to create
The first icons mirrored the ones in the DHIS2 software library. Then we added commonsense health icons to round out the collection. Later, we put a Request an icon link on our website, and we've had dozens of requests from medical professionals and software developers all over the world. You can see a full list of completed and still-to-do icons on the project's GitHub issues page.
Honestly, we're not too picky: any health-related icon that seems reasonable to our volunteer team gets added to the collection.
Icons vs. symbols
The original icon set was designed on a 48px grid. In hindsight, this made Health Icons more "symbols" than "icons." They were great when you needed a symbol to be recognizable on a large button, in a PowerPoint presentation or on a sign. But the 48px icons weren't ideal for user interfaces, especially alongside common icon sets like Google Material icons, Feather icons and Remix icons.
In 2024, we started redrawing many of the icons on a 24px grid (half the size), which meant reducing the detail in each icon. Today, many icons have been redrawn at this smaller size, which makes them much more useful in software interfaces and apps.
CC0 public domain
From the very beginning, we wanted Health Icons to be used as widely as possible, so we released all the icons under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license, a type of public domain license. This means anyone can use the icons, modify them in any way, sell them or sell products containing them, and we retain no ownership. We even let almost anyone into our Figma file so they can access the original icons.
The website
The Health Icons website was built to make the icons available to anyone. The original website was created by many of the same volunteers who designed the icons, with volunteer engineering help from Nicholas Burka and several of his colleagues from the web design company silverorange, including Steven Garrity and Michael Gauthier. We redesigned the website in 2026 to make icons easier to search and filter. We've tried to create a taxonomy for tagging the icons, but it could certainly be improved.