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Comment by onassar | Hacker News Reader

Hi all; I designed a site called Iconduck (https://iconduck.com).

There are so many dope open source icon sets out there. I brought a bunch of them (132 so far) under one roof. I made them searchable (using typesense.org), and list out the license details and link back to the site or GitHub repo.

I'm not much of a designer, and it's just a first stab at the concept. It's been done, but I wanted to also build it API-first, since I know it would be useful to be able to search through them all for developers.

I'm always on the lookout for new icon libraries to include, and plan on making it easier to learn more about the designers themselves. If you have any ideas on icon sets or libraries to include please let me know in the comments :)

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Super important: your website title should include search terms! It currently just says "Iconduck". It should be something like "Iconduck - free open source icons, images and cliparts"

Yep! Will get that data updated soon. Very much an MVP ;)

Check out: https://thenounproject.com/

This site has a similar goal, with a huge amount of icons already available, free to download.

Yep I know them very well! They're amazing! I wanted to build something that wasn't so much a product, but more so about the open source community and all the icons. They're a fantastic company and product, though!

I just checked them again, and I must say that I'm a bit disappointed in how they seem to have become more commercially oriented over the years.

Yeh it's tricky. They have some pretty amazing icons and services, and probably one of the most reliable APIs I've worked with. And so, that costs $. It is a bummer, but there's always that trade off I suppose.

Hoping Iconduck can fill a bit of a void when it comes to open source contributions. I'll be very consistent with it, adding new icons every week, improving the searching, and the design.

Can't you (legally) pull all the Create Commons-licensed icons from their website? Have you tried contacting the original creators?

We (Flaticon) tried that years ago. Very quickly got a letter from their lawyer pointing out that a) that was a violation of their ToS (right) and b) they have a sui generis database copyright that applies to whatever we got (doubtful, that applies in Europe to "big" parts of a collection).

We deleted everything we got from them. We got a second letter when we reached independently to some authors with CC icons, got their explicit approval and got their icons from their site. The same icons were also available on the noun, and I guess they thought we had downloaded them there. This time we answered back and never heard from them again.

They seemed pretty protective to me, and I would not recommend touching their site if you want to get a CC collection of icons without troubles.

Btw, Iconduck looks dope :) congrats!

Thanks for the context. I assume the original question was meant theoretically. My response in based, in part, on the fact that I really love Noun Project. They're an amazing company, have a great product, and have some phenomenal support. We've (a different product) been a customer of their API for 5+ years now.

I remember reading a little while ago about scraping and what is/isn't allowed. I find the legal/theory of it pretty interesting, but also irrelevant for Iconduck: I like icons and want to spend time bringing together as many open source ones as I can, while practicing some of my design skills.

Appreciate you checking is out. Flaticon is a gr8 product.

Do you mean from Noun Project? I wouldn't do that (for a couple reasons). The main one, is that I want to always be able to link back directly to the creator's repo and license. It gets a bit meta when people start collecting icons from other 3rd party sites. As for whether it's allowed, I think it depends on the specific license. For example, some licenses may not allow for redistribution generally, but then may grant a special license to a provider (for example, like Noun Project). So then, you may find yourself violating a license that you didn't even know about.

So the rule is, I'll only include icons that have licenses that specifically allow redistribution and attribution, and I'll almost always link back to the repo. The exception is some sets aren't hosted through GitHub or GitLab, so I'll link back to their respective website.

(see below; didn't reply to the right message)

Website looks great and returns icons for all my searches.

I hope I never have to use flaticon again after this. Their database of icons is amazing but website is so annoying.

Great to hear. I actually wanted to mention that Typesense very-generously is powering our search (https://typesense.org). They've been soooo easy to work with, so def consider them for any search projects.

Regarding flaticon: what about the site do you find annoying? This way I know what to avoid ;)

One feature I like on flaticon that you are missing is the option to download a png at a certain size. SVG is great, but if I want something quick to drop into an iOS app, grabbing the png at 64 pixels wide is very convenient.

I'm working on that right now. Hoping to have it up later tonight ;)

> Regarding flaticon: what about the site do you find annoying? This way I know what to avoid ;)

Oh so many things but being OSS I think you'll side-step most of them by virtue. But just to name a few, the way they mix premium icons inside free icons and trick you to click it. Download limit of 10 icons or so. The graphics of a animated crying person telling you to attribute the icon. The shady exit popup windows when you click on the page for the first time. Oh so many other annoying things; only if their database of icons wasn't so big.

Thank you for the feedback. Some people want to use the premium icons (as they are more exclusive), and they obviously help to keep the lights on, but I disagree with your point on us "tricking you to click it". They are clearly labelled, and if you're not interested at all in them you can filter them out. We will remember your preference and will not show them again.

There is a download limit on the icons you can download per day, with an exception to the limit if you're downloading a full pack. A platform that creates its own icons has different trade-offs than a platform that collect icons available for free, and that's another one of these trade-offs. We could remove the limit on CC icons, though.

I'm sorry that you have a sub-par experience with Flaticon, and glad that you extract some value from it.

The fact that our database is "so big" is because we paid artists to create these icons, and at the end of the day this money has to come from our customers, but I take note of your comments as we clearly have room to improve.

Thank you!

Thanks for the context and background. I believe one of the founders has commented in this thread, so I'll let them respond directly to that feedback.

I think you're right, though, regarding side-stepping things. I'd really love for this to be a long term OSS project that could pull in a bunch of developers and designers. I don't mind contributing my time and some hardware to help w/ the problem.

Hi, I would love to know what's so annoying in Flaticon. User feedback is always appreciated :) (co-founder here)

Great site, would love to see advanced search, especially to search within a specific icon set. Often I am building a graphic and want consistency across images, so finding an icon I like and then taking all other images I use from the same set would be super useful.

Yep! I already have that functionality done, I just haven't gotten around to building a nice UI/UX for that. On it, though.

Could you list all those 132 icon sets somewhere - iconduck.com/sets returns 404 and in iconduck.com/licenses you are showing only 1-2 set for each license.

Yep I had those listed, but ran into some performance issues. Will get that worked out (you guessed the right path, btw ;)

If you want, you can join the MailChimp so that I can let you know when that page is back up: https://iconduck.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=66c12f50e51...

Will you be open sourcing the site itself?

Hoping on it. I'm not as familiar with modern approaches to open sourcing the whole platform (I'm a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to development), but in the short term, I'll be open sourcing a ton of data for all the different icon sets, as well as little scripts and plugins I built for Iconduck.

Great job on the launch - I'm always trying to grab new icon sets. I'd love to be able to re-color icons (e.g. black --> white) and group them for batch downloads.

Yep the recoloring should be available pretty soon, as well as batch downloads :)

I was surprised the site did not have an icon, so I searched for duck and found the duckduckgo icon. are you sure it's opensource ?

The duckduckgo icons are labelled as such. Plenty of icon sets will have recognisable brand assets for the likes of social media platforms and so on, which will allow use according to certain guidelines.

Their inclusion probably isn't an issue in itself, but the blanket guidance in the copy above the result will be.

> The icons below can be used for Personal & Commercial purposes. They can be used on your website, branding and designs.

Obviously assets relating to existing brands will never be permitted for use in the branding of an unaffiliated party. onassar may want to update the guidelines to note such exclusions.

Thanks for the notes mrkwse. I try to show copy like the following when trademarks show up:

> Naturally, trademarks apply to any brand icons or logos above. That means that you can use them in practice (for example, linking to the respective service), but that the company likely has limitations on how else they can be used.

I need to do some work to communicate that better :)

Might be worth being very explicit which icons are trademarks. Facebook is obvious to basically anyone with an internet connection at this point, but there are plenty of brands that, despite (or because of) paying 7 figures to a big name design firm, ended up with super generic-looking symbols as their logos. "Ooh, that's a great apple/bird icon, I'll just use that."

Yep that's a good idea. I do some internal tagging when something is a brand logo, so I could use that data to put a little notice in the Preview modal that it's likely trademarked :)

Yep; those icons can be used freely, however Trademarks apply. Generally, that means you can use it (for example, link to Duck Duck Go), but you probably couldn't sell it on t-shirts

Love it! Search is a little slow for me (instant search would be great!) but other than that, awesome!

Especially for a "first stab!"

Thanks! The search is powered by Typesense (https://typesense.org), but there's a good chance I'm not running the queries properly. Will look into that, and hope to add instant search soon.

why "duck" though?

Haha fair enough. I like ducks, and thought it was a memorable name that had the domain available :)

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