Pretty soon, you may be seeing this icon in malls, airports, and restaurants, near the restrooms or in other designated areas, as well as on product packages: an international symbol for breastfeeding, designed by one of our community’s foremost designers, Matt Daigle, who is also known for his Deaf-related comics.

One of my co-workers, who is currently breastfeeding her son, alerted me to this news article on www.mothering.com, which is run by Mothering—Natural Family Living. They hosted a contest inviting designers to submit icon designs for breastfeeding, and to the thrill of Mothering and mothers everywhere, Daigle came up with the winning design: 

 breastfeeding

If you look through the news article and its related links, you’ll see the other design submissions. Now let me emphasize, icon and symbol design is incredibly difficult. IBM, Coca-Cola, and Apple (Macintosh) paid millions in developing their logos, mainly because in order to sell or promote a product, the image must be memorable and instantly recognizable. Daigle has achieved this effect with his design.  

The other icons submitted to Mothering…some of them have the quality of being recognizable in the sense that they represent breastfeeding, while others were more obscure…and none of them achieve the same fluid simplicity that infuses Daigle’s design. They all had flaws such as gender bias, too much detail, awkward sharpness, or graphic explicitness.  

Most societies could not cope with an icon that showed the female breast in plain terms, which some of the submitted designs did. Daigle was smart enough to avoid this while still evoking a relationship between the baby’s head and the breast, simply by using a circle positioned in just the right place. In his interview with Mothering, Daigle said he wanted to invoke a feeling of femininity, without being too blatant about it, and indeed, his choice of shapes, especially in how the contours are soft, carry this out very well.  

Daigle’s sensitivity to the needs of motherhood and breastfeeding stems from personal experience, both as a father and husband, and as a deaf person. His wife breastfed their son, and he recalls the difficulty in finding public facilities that catered to the needs of young families. Furthermore, he said that as “a profoundly deaf individual, I know how important it is to communicate through visual means.” Of course, this icon would be beneficial for all mothers, but as a deaf woman myself, I can’t help thinking about how nice it would be if deaf mothers everywhere could now just look for this icon and go take care of their babies, without having to go through the embarrassment of inquiring after such facilities, when communication with service personnel might be difficult.  

Daigle has signed his design over into the public domain, making it free of copyright and royalty restrictions. This means corporations, small businesses, organizations and individuals everywhere can now use this icon. Kudos to you, Mr. Daigle, for making a solid contribution to humanity!

—

© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.