The Noun Project is a great idea with a simple mission: “sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world’s visual language”.

The project “collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way” with the aim of being able to communicate across cultures through visual imagery. All the symbols featured on their site are free, as the founders are excited by the idea of being able to communicate through simple representations as well as their artistic merits.

In August the project hosted an “Iconathon” to design symbols for concepts of food and nutrition. The idea behind it was to “facilitate better and easier communication between communities and the food organizations working to improve consumption of healthy, nutritious, locally grown foods”. Whilst not all the symbols are yet available on their website, the project does have symbols for both cake and cupcake already!

If you’re interested, take a look at their website, or follow @NounProject on Twitter.