National Toilet Map Icons.

Everyone has to go. So let’s make it as easy and inclusive as we possibly can.

We worked with Human Solutions to develop a suite of custom icons for the National Toilet Map Project for the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care. The Toilet Map provides a comprehensive resource of toilet facilities across Australia - and critically, it indexes features for each toilet. Toilet map users can find a toilet that suits their requirements easily on the web, or on their phones.

The design challenge here was to create a comprehensive suite of icons that had both a consistent internal design language, that also felt harmonious with the ISO international symbol set. The ISO set is incomplete - and doesn’t have solutions for many toilet features indexed on the Australian National Toilet Map. In addition to this the brief called for looking at stigma and preconceptions. Redrawing the standard wheelchair icon so it was positive, and active and less static seems like a small thing, but it brings a positive energy and a sense of movement in a carefully considered way.

Human Solutions were incredible partners in this project and we had many long conversations as we weighed up various approaches to this complex set of design problems.

Good design gets out of the way when it needs to - this project is a perfect example of that fundamental principle.