Help contribute to BioIcons development

BioIcons needs to grow further to support the cause of open scientific illustrations for the life sciences. You can get engaged in the following ways.

Draw illustrations and share them

The most welcome way of supporting the platform is by sharing illustrations you created and own the copyright for in open vector format. You can use e.g Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator to create illustrations. The easiest way to contribute illustrations is via web form under bioicons.com/submit.

All illustrations will be checked by team members. If you want become a maintainer and be involved in icon curation please open an issue in the repository or contact us.

Our standards for submitting illustrations are:

• Vector only in SVG format
• No excessive whitespace (trim the size of the illustration to the content)
• Avoid inline styles or bitmap textures in the SVG file. If you are using Adobe Illustrator make sure you convert all class based styling to inline styles. Settings for illustrator
• Respect our code of conduct and make sure your illustrations are scientifically accurate. In particular, we want to avoid stereotypical depictions (for example images with only white men doing science or women in high heels in the lab)
• You certify you own the copyright or have properly specified the license and the original author
• Illustrations should have a certain degree of complexity (not just a few spheres and some text).
• We aim for illustrations to follow a style of abstracted realism or flat 2D. This means they should be of typical clipart quality such as already found on the BioIcons website. We will ask you to improve illustrations that look too cartoony or too much like a sketch/handrawn in order to match the style.
• Illustrations should mostly be single building blocks and not full figures (i.e an icon of the corona virus particle but not the complete life cycle of the virus). We invite you to split such illustrations into their individual components.

For all illustrations submitted via the Webform a Pull Request on GitHub will be created and you can track progress of your submission there. We might have questions or suggestions for categorization, naming or general design of your illustration so it is advisable that you provide a GitHub username.

Become a developer

There are a number of open issues and feature suggestions on github waiting for implementation. We’d welcome developers that are familiar with frontend development using Vue, Nuxt and Tailwind to contribute. A new backend will also be created at some point. Here python or php developers could become active and contribute to the project. Contact us if interested.

Contribute financially

We set up a registered non-profit in Belgium with the support of OpenCollective Europe. If you have the financial means to support us you can do that there (tax deduction possible). We still aim to secure funding from an academic founder but this is a great way to contribute in the mean time. All donated money will be spent transparently. Here is the link to donate: opencollective.com/bioicons