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Community Guidelines

Last updated 21 August 2026 · Plain English

HMI Library is a place where automation engineers create ISA-101 / ISA-5.1 symbols in the Symbol Builder and publish them for everyone to use. These guidelines explain what belongs here, how the Creative Commons licence works, what the automatic ISA-101 check does, and how moderation works. They form part of the Terms & Conditions.

Purpose

The goal of the community is a shared, standards-based library of HMI symbols that any engineer can trust at a glance: consistent with the official catalog, drawn in the calm ISA-101 palette, with clean geometry that still reads at 32 px on an operator screen. Every symbol you publish makes that library better for the next person — and carries your name as the author.

Three things keep it that way: publish work that is yours and fits the style, attribute the work of others, and report what does not belong.

What to publish

Publish symbols you would be happy to see on a real HMI next to the official ones. In practice:

ISA-101 / ISA-5.1 style. Process equipment, valves, instruments, conveyors, sensors, alarm badges, connection lines, or vendor- or industry-specific equipment the official catalog does not cover yet. Follow the grammar of the standard: ISA-5.1 instrument bubbles, mounting conventions (field / DCS / PLC / shared), P&ID-style outlines.
Calm palette. Greys for the body of the symbol; colour only for state and alarms, and only from the ISA-101 set used across the site:

#C8C8C8 HMI background #9E9E9E stopped #616161 disabled #2E7D32 running #1976D2 P4 / manual #FBC02D P3 #F57C00 P2 #D32F2F P1 / fault

Clean geometry. Shapes snapped to the grid, consistent stroke width, no gradients, shadows, textures or photo-realism. Fill only where the standard fills. Leave the tag and label to the HMI — the Builder can add them, but a bare symbol is more reusable.
Useful metadata. A clear title ("Centrifugal pump, end suction"), the right category, and a handful of honest tags. A short description of what it represents and when to use it helps others — and helps search.
Original or properly remixed. Your own work, or a remix of a published community symbol made with "Open in builder" (the platform credits the original automatically).

What not to publish

Work that is not yours. Symbols copied from proprietary vendor libraries (HMI software faceplates, paid icon sets), from a client's or employer's project without permission, or traced from copyrighted drawings.
Files that could harm a viewer or an HMI. The Builder generates clean SVG; do not try to inject scripts, event handlers, external images or fonts, or tracking of any kind.
Content that misrepresents safety-critical standards. Do not claim ISA, IEC, ISO 7010 or other conformance or certification a symbol does not have, imitate official certification marks, or use alarm-priority colours and safety colours decoratively in a way that could mislead an operator.
Off-topic, offensive or spam content. Logos, advertising, memes, personal data, near-duplicate uploads, keyword-stuffed titles, or anything hateful, harassing or unlawful. The same applies to comments.
Unchanged copies of another user's symbol published as your own. Remix, add something, and credit — or just like the original.

The full list of prohibited content is in Section 9.5 of the Terms.

Licensing: CC BY 4.0

Everything published on HMI Library is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. In short:

You keep ownership of your symbols. Publishing does not transfer them to HMI Library or anyone else.
Anyone may use, copy, modify and redistribute your published symbols, including in commercial HMI projects, as long as they credit you.
The licence is irrevocable for copies already distributed. You can unpublish a symbol at any time, but people who downloaded it while it was public can keep using it under CC BY 4.0.
Private symbols are not licensed. Symbols you save without publishing stay yours alone (and count against your download quota when you export them; published symbols do not).

How to attribute a community symbol

When you use someone else's symbol, credit them wherever is reasonable for the medium: in the project documentation, in an "About" or "Credits" screen of the HMI, in a README of a derived library, or in the SVG metadata. Include the title, the creator, the link to the symbol page and the licence, and say if you changed it. A single line is enough:

"Centrifugal pump" by jdoe — hmilibrary.com/s/centrifugal-pump — CC BY 4.0 (modified)

The symbol page gives you everything for this line: the title, the creator's username, the page link and the licence. Remixes published on HMI Library are linked to the original automatically; if you publish a remix elsewhere, add the same credit for the original creator.

The automatic ISA-101 check

When you publish, the Builder runs an automatic check on your symbol and stores the result with it. It is a small, formal check of the things a person would look at first when reviewing a symbol for an ISA-101 screen — colours, line weight and size — not a full review of the file:

Palette

Only ISA-101 colours

Every fill and stroke colour is one of the ISA-101 colours used across the site: the calm grey scale, the state / alarm colours listed above, white and "none". Any other colour fails the check.

Stroke

Consistent line weight

Every stroke width is one of the official steps used by the catalog — 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 or 3 px — so the symbol does not look heavier or lighter than its neighbours.

Structure

Clean SVG — by construction

Not a check: the Builder only exports its own shapes, so every published file is plain SVG with a fixed viewBox and no scripts, external references or raster images. The Builder is the only way to publish.

Legibility

Reads small

The canvas is not empty, holds at most 120 elements, and every stroke width stays within the official 1–3 px steps above. The check does not measure shape size or position on the canvas.

Symbols that pass every rule receive the badge:

ISA ISA-101 compliant

What the badge means: the file passed a formal, automated check of palette, stroke width and element count at the time it was published. What it does not mean: that HMI Library or ISA has reviewed or endorsed the symbol, that it is semantically correct for the equipment it claims to represent, or that it is suitable for any particular plant. Symbols without the badge can still be published and downloaded; the explore gallery lets you filter to compliant symbols only. We may re-run the check and revoke the badge if the rules or the file change.

Moderation & reports

Publishing is immediate — nobody reviews your symbol before it goes live. Moderation happens afterwards:

Report. Every symbol and comment has a "Report" button. Tell us why in a sentence or two (for example: copyright, malicious file, off-topic or spam, misleading safety claim, abusive comment).
Review. We look at reports and takedown notices and respond within 10 business days; clear cases (malicious files, obvious copies, abuse) are usually handled much faster. We may hide content while we look.
Actions. Depending on the case: remove or hide the content, revoke the ISA-101 badge, lock comments, warn the author, or suspend or close the account. Repeat infringers are removed.
Your side. If your content is hidden or removed we tell you why by email, and you can reply with a counter-notice to hello@hmilibrary.com.

Rights holders who believe a symbol infringes their work should send a notice as described in Section 9.7 of the Terms (link to the content, the work concerned, contact details, good-faith statement) to hello@hmilibrary.com.

Safety note

Review before you use a community symbol on a real HMI. Community symbols are published "as is" by their authors and checked only automatically. The check covers palette, stroke width and element count — not whether the symbol is the right representation for your equipment, your standard, or your operators. Before it reaches a running screen, make sure it matches your P&ID conventions, your alarm philosophy and your site style guide, and that the states and colours it uses mean what your operators expect. That engineering review is yours; neither HMI Library nor the creator can do it for you.

Contact

Questions about these guidelines, reports you prefer to send by email, takedown notices and counter-notices: hello@hmilibrary.com. For security vulnerabilities, see the Security & Compliance page.