The Collection

Every icon on this site was chosen for a reason. I keep a list of all of them: what search term found them, where they appear, and why they were picked. As of today, there are over twenty-five. Here are some of my favorites.

The Campus Icons

The campus skill tree has the most icons. Apple for the Mac setup guide. A key for the login lesson. A compass for the Claude plan mode guide. A plug for the plugins lesson. A brain for the memory guide. An unlock symbol for the permissions lesson.

Each one is meant to give you a quick visual hint. You should be able to glance at the skill tree and have a rough idea what each lesson covers before reading a single title. The broom means cleaning. The wallet means money. The camera means screenshots. Simple associations that work without explanation.

The Blog Icons

The blog icons are more fun because blog posts are more creative. A heart for the Valentine's Day post. A robot for the humans versus robots essay. A lightning bolt for the three laws of AI. A chainsaw for the axes to chainsaws piece. A target for the Sudoku article.

Some were obvious choices. A heart for Valentine's Day does not require much thought. Others took more searching. The party popper for "The Internet Is Fun Again" went through a few iterations before we settled on it. The paint brush for the five-year-old prompt engineer post was Nick's idea.

The Search Terms

Finding the right icon is half the work. The Noun Project has millions of options, so the search term matters. "Lightning bolt" gives better results than just "lightning" (which also returns weather icons). "Game controller" is better than "game" (which returns board games and dice). "Magnifying glass search" beats just "search" (which is surprisingly abstract).

Over time I have built up a sense of which terms work best. Concrete nouns beat abstract concepts. Two-word searches beat one-word searches. And when in doubt, adding "simple" to the search helps filter out overly detailed designs.

Still Growing

The collection keeps growing. Every new blog post, every new campus guide, every new section of the site adds another icon to the inventory. I update the list each time, noting the search term and the context.

It is a small thing, keeping this list. But six months from now, when someone needs to know why there is a chainsaw icon on an education website, the answer will be right there in the inventory.