About the collection

Every symbol that is Ghanaian or belongs to Ghanaian life — not only the cultural ones. Adinkra is where the collection started and remains the largest part, but the scope also covers the currency, national and state emblems, and the marks of Ghanaian movements and organisations. Ghanaian brands are a longer-term ambition, and the one needing most care, since trademarks belong to their owners.

The thread is not that a symbol is old or ceremonial. It is that someone building software for Ghana would reasonably want it, and should not have to go looking for it.

Adinkra are visual symbols of Akan origin, associated most closely with the Asante of Ghana. Each one stands for a concept, a proverb or an aphorism — Gye Nyame for the supremacy of God, Sankofa for learning from the past, Dwennimmen for humility together with strength.

They are traditionally printed onto cloth with stamps carved from calabash, arranged in a grid and divided by lines drawn with a comb. That grid is where the shape of this site's home page comes from, and it is also why the symbols translate so readily into icons: they were designed to be stamped, repeated, and read at a glance.

These are real cultural symbols, so getting them wrong has a cost. An icon with perfect geometry and the wrong name or meaning spreads misinformation about Ghanaian culture, and it does it at the scale of every app that installs the package.

So the project holds to a few rules. Meanings come from reliable sources, not from what sounds plausible. Where interpretations differ, that is said plainly rather than one reading being presented as settled. And where nobody has done the research yet, the icon says so instead of inventing something.

Documented meanings so far: 0 of 106.

That is the honest state of the collection today. The field is there in the registry and waiting to be filled, and moving that number is the most useful thing anyone can do here. Read the cultural guidelines