Walk into any workplace and the safety signs make instant sense. A red circle with a line through it means do not. A yellow triangle means take care. That shared visual language exists because safety symbols are governed by international standards. Business risk has no equivalent, and that gap is what prompted us to build a set of business risk icons and give them away.
Why Safety Has Symbols and Business Risk Icons Do Not
Safety signage is standardised. ISO 7010 holds a register of safety signs for accident prevention, fire protection, health hazard information and emergency evacuation, with each sign built on the shapes and colours defined in the ISO 3864 series. A prohibition is a red ring, a warning is a yellow triangle, a mandatory action is a blue disc, and the meaning carries across languages and borders. There is no comparable register for business risk. Operational, financial, compliance, information security, people and strategic risks are written out in full on registers and assessments, with no agreed symbol to carry the meaning. The reader has to parse the text every time.
A Free Set of Business Risk Icons
To bring some of that clarity to business risk, we have created a set of business risk icons and released them on our Free Files page. The scheme is simple. Orange hexagons mark risks, green circles mark controls, and red rings mark prohibited actions. They cover a broad range of business-risk topics, including data loss, cyber, fraud, supply chain, people and conduct, and the use of AI tools, each with matching controls and prohibitions. Copied into a risk assessment, they let a completed document read at a glance rather than as a wall of text. They were built to accompany our F-Q36 General Risk Assessment, but they are free to use in your own registers and assessments however you see fit.
Where the Business Risk Icons Come From
The icons are based on Tabler Icons, the open-source library created by Pawel Kuna, which is published under the MIT licence and drawn on a consistent 24 pixel grid. The MIT licence permits commercial use and does not require attribution, but we credit Tabler all the same, and the full attribution sits with the icon key in the download. We adapted the glyphs into the risk, control and prohibition scheme above, so the result is coherent rather than a grab-bag of clip art. Use them, adapt them, and if you find them useful, the Tabler project is worth supporting.
F-Q36A Appendix i Business Risk Symbols (Free Files)
Published: 19 June 2026
