Show HN: An icon for every city in North America
evans.bikeTo my knowledge there is no icon pack for cities in NA below a certain size. So I created one! An icon for every city in NA with >100k population. 544 in total. Generated with Nano Banana Pro. These cost me ~$70 to generate. Giving away for free! Some exceptions are 1 city for each US state that didn't have a city above 100k population such as Burlington Vermont. I also took liberties with what icon was used such as Whale Tales for BTV. Surprisingly, smaller cities have many competing landmarks and it can be hard to choose! Feel free to contribute corrections.
AI icons, ofc...some of which are questionable (as it is with AI). Many of them are generic clock tower icons with small variations, while some are showing an icon that is based on a marginal attraction in the area. eg Irvine is known for the Irvine Company, John Wayne Airport, not for the symbolic amusement park hot air balloon raised in 2007.
OTOH, Greensboro being the diner chairs from the sit-ins that started there is quite the deep cut.
I'm enthusiastic about the idea, but I think the approach is flawed. "Cities over 100k" misses the real regional keystones (some of which are really counties, not cities), so I'm seeing ones that I would expect to be there missing. And the ones I do know aren't the best represented.
Specifics: Alexandria is basically DC, and probably shouldn't be included without several places that are missing in Maryland. I have no idea what Baltimore's icon is supposed to be (edit: wait, is that supposed to be the Domino Sugar sign?), and while the Capitol dome is a decent choice, the Washington Monument would probably work better as a symbol of Washington.
This could really be a launching point for crowdsourcing a more handcrafted set, though.
Yeah, it's not accounting for metropolitan areas very well. I found it kind of hilarious that Federal Way, WA (a minor part of the Seattle metro area) got an icon but Olympia (the state capitol!) didn't- because Federal Way has a population of 100k in the city proper but Olympia only has 55k (but its metro area has 300k).
Cool idea, but evidently most cities do not have an iconic enough thing for this to be viable for them. You'd probably have to dip into sports team logos.
How well do the models do if you ask for an SVG instead of just generating a PNG? It would make editing & using them easier, but I don't know if image generation still wins for these types of icons.
Why is Atlanta a phoenix but Phoenix, the 5th largest city in the US, not?
Is Atlanta really a phoenix or a falcon? Also, why do some cities have more than one icon? Seattle has the Space Needle, yet Dallas is a cowboy hat and not the Reunion Tower. Dallas has fewer cowboy hats being worn than other cities. I'd put all of this down to how lame vibe coded content is due to the limitations of LLMs
It’s a phoenix alright, which apparently is on their city flag, but so is Phoenix’s…
Neat! I'm surprised my city of Lakewood, Colorado showed up. Of course the icon is of Casa Bonita lol
Icons are supposed to have some amount of stroke width consistency, detail consistency, etc. This is giving AI slop vibes immediately.