Show HN: A Better Alternative to Font Awesome – Unicons | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Better Alternative to Font Awesome – Unicons

iconscout.com

You should get a github, seriously the way I bookmark these things these days is github stars.

We've that here: https://github.com/iconscout/unicons Btw, good idea to post GitHub here! Will do it next time :D

One thing I'm always interested in with products like this is the economics of hosting a CDN of static assets for a large base of free users. How is it that products like this, or like Font Awesome at a much larger scale, can support the needs of so many free users? I understand that some free CDNs for open-source libraries like Bootstrap operate based on in-kind donations from hosting providers, but I still wonder how the model in general stays afloat.

What makes this "better"?

The license restrictions?

"No Unlawful Useused to create pornographic, libelous, obscene or defamatory Material. No Commercial use of “Editorial Only” Items: You can not use content marked "Editorial Only" for any commercial, promotional, advertorial, endorsement, advertising or merchandising purpose. This type of content is not model or property released and is intended to be used only in connection with events that are newsworthy or of general interest."

Thank you for pointing this out, it took me a long time to find this ( https://iconscout.com/licenses ) - and in the process I became extremely confused about what license one gets when they use the different plans (free, 69 per year, etc) -

What started out as, this might be cool - (I'm always looking for ways to reduce size of fonts and icons!) - to how does this work? (tooltips would be helpful for me, I have no idea what things are supposed to DO on this page, like the bottom right and bottom left icons..) - I also could not find details on how to use the code (where is the cdn / download css etc like font awesome has)

After spending so much time trying to find the "how" - and then looking for the license restrictions, and seeing there are all kinds of other upsells and more restrictions on uses - this won't be bookmarked or used by me or anyone I know.

Not that this thing is bad - it may be great for some people for some reason - there are many things that have those kinds of use restrictions that may be useful for people, but will never be on my consider list.

I think there's some confusion. Regrets for bad UX here.

All the Line icons are under Apache-2.0 License. https://github.com/iconscout/unicons

PS: We're always free for Open Source.

thanks for chiming in on this - so the unicons can be used on anything? and the other products who guys sell... stock photos? can't be used on sex sites?

I have an open, as in free to use sex chat site, it's not overly pornographic, but vimeo refused and refunded my pro account because of one hardcore solo sex pic on the second page of the site -

So I am used to looking for issues.. when I started using fontello to snipe pieces of font awesome and such I deployed that custom icon and font code to a half dozen adult web sites within a month.. so if your service would leave us with any kind of complaints in the future, please inform now - I would hate to run into the same issue I ran into with another company in India - RtMedia - where we spent considerable time and a bit of money merging sites with their code.. and now they won't take support tickets on a problem plugin since it's an adult site - (they have changed terms to be more restrictive since when we first started using them) - so now I have some serious problems with photo galleries and other things that would not be an issue if I skipped using them and instead went with the one 'competitor' that does not have the same issues.

This is not a complaint - it's totally cool to do whatever you want to do with your stuff, just curious what possible problems could arise. thanks for looking out.

The ux did get quite confusing - what stuff is available, what stuff is included with different prices - and there appears to be separate issue with licensing depending not on what products you offer, or which plan someone signs up for, but also where the products are to be placed?

I remember something similar with fotolia, which has been aquired and ruined by adobe - so maybe the internet archive can show the kind of ux they had and may be helpful?

I think it was pay for use (like on a web site, banner ad, etc), pay extra for put assets into a product to sell (like software for sale)- and pay much extra for license to use on physical merchandise for sale. Maybe three checkboxes to choose the use before adding to cart? Barely remember, it's been a long while.

I think using the term open source is not always good for people- as there are different definitions it seems.. like is it free? or is it open source to see but not free to use.. or. I'm using open source software on my sex chat site (wordpress) and it's free to use - so it's kind of that.. but you can't open up the database and look at private messages.

I dunno, maybe you are trying to put your products only in software for sale and not advertisements or web sites in general. Not sure, hope these thoughts help.

Oops. Sorry for confusion, I'll covey this confusion to our design team. Line icons are under Apache-2.0 License. Here you go: https://github.com/iconscout/unicons

Plus Editorial part is there for images on Iconscout, not for icons.

Which icon set has this restriction? I'm not seeing it in Font Awesome's.

Line Icons are under Apache-2.0 license. https://github.com/iconscout/unicons

css.gg is actually better because now you don't need additional svg files, no fancy webpack/rollup build tools plugins required, it is plain css and you can copy paste the css that you need.

Have you checked this? https://iconscout.com/unicons/getting-started/line. We do support plain optimized CSS :)

This looks pretty cool. Is there a simple way to just use the CSS for icons that you use and discard the rest?

Yep here you go https://iconscout.com/unicons/getting-started/line.

If you view the icons it shows the CSS you can add yourself to have just that icon, or a link to import just that one icon via their site.

There are multiple factors: - We've designed these icons according to new design styles like Flat in mind. Thus all the line icons are pretty sleek when it comes to usage compared to Font Awesome. - You can request more icons from us and we'll be happy to add them to the library. We're mostly adding new icons on monthly basis. - We love & powered by Open Source. So all our premium icons are free for all the open source projects. - First ever unique Monochrome style available that will look great for all your landing pages too. - Many more!

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