Icon Request: mining pool

[vnprc]

[Explain the icon you think would fit well in this icon set and why it would be useful to Bitcoiners.]

I really like your icon set but it lacks an icon for mining pools. My open source project is a mining pool that anyone can run. I think a simple swimming pool icon would fit the bill. I would use something like this on my dashboard page.

[Have you done any design work for this icon? If so, share it below. Make sure you have followed our icon styling in CONTRIBUTING.md]

Not really. My twitter avatar is pretty close to what I want. Just a simple above ground pool. I'm really just going for a graphical representation of the word "pool". You don't have to put the # symbol in it but it would be dope if you did. =D

this one is ugly but it has the right vibe

[Extra info - icons similar to the one you are requesting, mock ups using your icon, references etc.]

I vibed up this website over the past few days. Check out those icons! I would swap the pickaxe on the pool dashboard page with a pool icon.

[GBKS]

Thanks for the request. I added it to the next release milestone that I'll work on in the next weeks.

[GBKS]

How about this? A group of hashes.

We have a bunch of water-related icons with mining pool, faucet, and liquidity, but I am not really sure that leaning on literal interpretations is the way to go. Here's how I'm thinking about those in my first draft of the next milestone (mining pool, send limit, receive limit, and gift box).

How does that approach work for you?

[vnprc]

I actually prefer literal interpretations. I tend to think in pictures and heavily lean on metaphors in my thinking. It's just more intuitive to me. That's why I love emojis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here is the site I built using the current selection of icons (which are awesome and I love them btw!).

Almost all of the icons are physical objects that map to a concept: wallet, mining pick, miner (person). I like the QR code icon because it maps exactly to what you see on screen, but that's usually not an option. I intend to add a hashrate graph page and use the graph icon because that's another lucky case where I want to represent what the user sees on the page.

On the pool dashboard I get a little bit more conceptual but still use literal interpretations of concepts: blocks for job declarators (the services that create and validate block templates), and coins for the mint.

I would not use the three hash signs on my site because it just doesn't make sense to my lizard brain. Likewise for the present icon. I have to engage higher thinking centers to connect the dots between a collection of hashes and a mining pool. I'm a backend dev so it would be like reading from disk when you really only need to use RAM for this task. (See what I meant about thinking in metaphors? :)

A picture of a faucet or a swimming pool would trigger the existing association in my lizard brain. No need to read from disk, that stuff lives in RAM.

For new users who don't already have strong mental concepts of mining pools and bitcoin faucets I think it would probably be equally confusing either way but with the literal interpretations and repetition we can introduce them to an already strong community of people who have these associations. They would be learning word associations from graphical media that are highly useful in verbal communication.

Plus I just think the object depictions look better. They have nice closed shapes that are easier to pick out from the background. Another easy win for the lizard brain. (This argument also applies to the present icon.)

[GBKS]

Makes sense. Maybe it's good to just include both in the set. The more general icons can often be used to represent multiple things, so there's always room for those. What do you think of these variations?

[vnprc]

I think #6 without the hash symbol would look best, with renormalized proportions. I'm targeting the icon on the left of the pool row here:

[ironandsilk]

@GBKS
#4 or #6.
#4 with the hash
#6 as a variant without the hash

Potentially with fewer waves.
The hashes look a little long.
Great job.
Icon design is so hard.
I don't think I would have come up with this many good options.

Many people are using wave or air blowing icons with mining UIs, but air relates to fans too much.