Feather – open source icons | Hacker News Reader

Feather – open source icons

feathericons.com

532 pointsvmoore93 comments

Lucide[1] is a very active fork of Feather and what I’ve been using for the past few years instead.

Feather is great as are their design guidelines, but it needs way way more icons. Lucide picks up beautifully where it left off.

[1] https://lucide.dev/

I wonder why signal-zero and signal-low are the same icon

And signal-high is lower than signal.

I guess some discretion is required before using any of those icon fonts. That's really not a point against it.

Anyway, my favorite feature is that the disability guy is in a rush.

> anyway my favorite feature is that the disability guy is in a rush

That’s actually a thing now: https://blog.logomyway.com/new-handicapped-logo-and-the-hist...

That's interesting.

For me the rushing icon does look better. But I wonder why they didn't make the icon on a more normal position, with the body and arms closer to the resting position. We don't make signage with people running except when we actually want to say that they are going fast; the same should apply here.

> I wonder why they didn't make the icon on a more normal position, with the body and arms closer to the resting position.

The article linked by grandparent says: "the new design pictures a handicapped individual with their head tilted forward, indicating their mobility and that they are in control of where they are going. The new design also pictures the individual with their arms back, once again indicating that they are dynamic and in control of their own mobility."

Yes, but the icon should look like the person is "walking" instead of "running". Even though it is a beautiful icon, the effect is misleading.

If you just reduce the inclination of the body and arms, you get that effect.

I think it is intentional and I think the reason isn't very hard to figure out. Handicapped has been associated with "incapable" for a long time, and this is intentionally turning that on its head to force people to (maybe!) subconsciously reconsider when they start seeing this symbol spray painted in parking lots, plastered on walls, and otherwise surrounding them in the spaces they regularly visit.

This wasn't meant to be a neutral change, or even a change to bring it from negative connotations to neutral - it's the equivalent of affirmative action for symbols.

This 2014 article/podcast episode does a deep dive you might find interesting: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/icon-for-access/

Looks like it's just an accident: https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide/pull/428#issuecomment...

beside the fact that an error like this actually made it into a release, should it really take more than six months for such a simple correction?

You can't really hold an open source project like this to such a high level of scrutiny, all development was likely done in people's spare time with no compensation.

You must be new here....

But seriously, I 100% agree! No one is paying for these icons. Mistakes happen. The world is not ending if they do not get corrected immediately. We all have a ton of things we are working on and cannot always make our FLOSS side-projects our top priority.

(Though, I will readily admit that this raises some provocative questions about how much "mission critical" projects should rely on open source projects which they have no contract/SLA/affiliation with...)

I don't think it really is that provocative -- clearly if you have no relationship with an open source project then they don't owe you anything, and you can't rely on them. So if your project is mission critical, then you either need to start up that relationship or apply internal engineering effort to vetting their code.

Of course I'm sure the second person to touch a computer did something irresponsible with it, so what can you do, right?

Is this the point? if a company really absolutely rely on an open source/ free softwarem, they have obvious benefits to help develop it.

Hrmmm... while your comment is intended in good faith, I think it actually does a disservice to open source.

I've seen plenty of terrible quality closed source projects and even some impressive high quality closed source projects that were still imperfect and open to human error.

I don't think we should have lower levels of scrutiny or expectations from open source projects. I do think the gp's criticism was exaggerated and unwarranted for any project, open or closed.

On the other hand, it also displays the unbelievable entitledness of many, many people in tech, that feel right to not only shit on the work that others have provided for free (when they're probably going to use it in projects that make actual money), but also have the gall to say that the maintainers should fix it faster.

It's open source, you've seen the error and you know how to fix it. Make a pull request yourself.

They accept bug fix contributions.

If it really bothers you so much, it sounds like it would’ve taken you less time to fix it than to complain all the way over here. I’m pointing this out not because open source is often thankless (it can be), but because this kind of negativity snipe is often demoralizing even for those of us not even maintaining the project.

Thanksfully someone did which show also the beauty of the open source, it only took a few minutes for someone to volunteer and provide a correction, which the poster above could have done instead of complaining.

https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide/pull/812

Didn't know about Lucide! Thanks for sharing

Tabler-icons is also a larger set with similar design specs to feather) lucide

This looks great! Thanks for the share!

Shameless self promotion: IconSear.ch[1] - instant icon search of almost 100K icons[2] from over 100 sources[3] (including feather!), linked directly to the icon source. More source ideas welcome!

[1] https://iconsear.ch/search.html

[2] https://iconsear.ch/icons/index.html

[3] https://iconsear.ch/sources/index.html

Nice!

This is great!

I'd consider making the search experience more like https://www.flaticon.com/. The drop-shadow boxes are too distracting. Adding consistent spacing will help too.

I love that it's easy to get to the source, but having a page in between would be nice to see other icons from the set and information about where the icon is from.

Rather than an interstitial page, I'm thinking of overlay buttons (like Gmail has for attachments) for viewing info/the rest of the set/etc.

I like instant search better than suggestions/autocomplete. It also works with JavaScript disabled though not instant.

it would be nice to have a filter by a type of license

A bit late but I have a problem with whichever icon search sites I've come across: it's hard to find a set.

For example if I search Facebook, I get dozens of icons. Now how do I find the same style of icons for Twitter, etc. If you can fix that, it'll truly make you awesome.

The Scissors icon shares a common fault with many other scissor symbols and emojis: the finger holes are too large for the blades to actually close (and thus cut). This is something that I can't now unsee, once it was pointed out to me.

Thanks, now I can't unsee it either and will be on the lookout for it wherever I come across a scissors icon.

God damn it! Why'd you have to point this out!

https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html

And most butterflies when displayed in icons and such are dead [0].

---

[0]: https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/

Shameless plug.

My set, Microns, has fewer icons but is good for starting new projects.

https://www.s-ings.com/projects/microns-icon-font/

The icons are intentionally designed to not have too much personality. Less rounded and cutesy than Feather.

These look great! Thank you for making and sharing.

These are awesome!

One can also use Inkscape Open Symbols [1].

[1]: https://github.com/PanderMusubi/inkscape-open-symbols

They're surprisingly good. I've come to expect built-in icon sets, themes, etc to be terrible in just about every program.

I love these icons! Have used them in a few projects.

A similar project I also enjoy using is https://heroicons.com/

I highly appreciate things like this. But honestly, it's so hard to tell the difference between all the different icon libraries. Would love to see an Html standard library for these.

This basically feels like a solved problem.

I thought moving the size slider would switch to icon versions designed with less/more detail to accommodate extreme sizes, but this is cool and since it's OSS someone might make a PR for that at some point!

Glad to see it being featured here. Been a big fan since the beginning.

Probably already mentioned before (lazy to scroll) but if you’re building something and need icons don’t just use one package.

If you’re building in React or a compatible JSX library use react icons (https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/).

It lets you pick and choose from many packs (Feather included) and if you’re careful with your selections you can meet pretty much all needs in a cohesive way. Until you can afford an in house designer :P

Maybe I am not getting it, but feather icons have been around for a while (I am a big fan). I am therefore surprised that nobody posted this link before. Or did they just release the website?

I miss color icons, but the Tango-style icons look dated in modern apps, and unfortunately DPI scaling arguably smudges colored icons more than line-based icons (even if both are vectors).

Yeah, I’m missing icon libraries that actually look good on lower-DPI screens. 10-15 years ago was peak good-looking icon.

KDE's Breeze icons are SVG and look great on high DPI screens. I've used them in web projects a few times.

https://github.com/KDE/breeze-icons

layer8 was asking for icons that look good on low DPI screens. Breeze'a toolbar icons are mostly monochrome, which works but IMO is missing the charm of 98's colorized icons through Vista/7's 3D icons.

It’s like the whole web has come to the conclusion that icons have to be monochrome and boring. Why? What is this group-think? Why do other styles of icons “look dated”? I have nothing against the “metro” or “modern” (by m$) style per se. Like all designs it has its strengths and weaknesses. But I miss variety, Icon-sets (or websites for that matter) with personality. “metro” used to have personality, but has long since lost it because everything looks the same. Anyone here remember the silk icons? [1] I’m not arguing they are superior. But moar variety please: “silk icons”, “flat icons”, “silly icons”, “school icons”, “cartoon icons”… </rant>

[1]: http://famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/preview.php

I remember the Silk icons, I still have a soft spot for them. I even tried using them in an app, but they upscale very poorly even with xBRZ (IIRC I used something like https://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/files/ScalerTest_1.1.z...).

Similarly, Visual Studio actually comes with an icon library at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/..., though 2012 sadly switched from 3D icons (a mixed bag, some beautiful ones and then some awful ones like a downscaled yellow-shaded XP-era exclamation point triangle) to flat line art indistinguishable from today's icon style except in having backgrounds. You can find "totally legal" offline downloads of VS2010 on archive.org (the online installer is down).

> I even tried using them in an app, but they upscale very poorly

Someone made the effort and ported them to .svg [1]

Donationware

[1]: https://codefisher.org/pastel-svg/

Interesting icon set. I love the idea behind it, but looking at their icon preview at https://i0.wp.com/codefisher.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/..., I noticed that some images look great at higher resolutions (the star), while others look like a bad hqx/xbrz job, with a mix of curved, pixel-aligned (lock, book, anchor, monitor stand), and blurred features (book stripes), with inconsistent line widths (the house's roof and bushes, the computer stand and anchor).

I contributed the RSS icon[1] to Feather a few years ago. The circle shape in the RSS icon is visually denser and deviates from all other shapes in the icon set. I apologize for breaking the constraints but in my defense, it looks much nicer this way

[1] https://feathericons.com/?query=rss

Feather: Open-source icons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089916 - Aug 2017 (140 comments)

My favourite open source icon set these days is - https://phosphoricons.com/

Another project by a friend of mine. Shameless promotion: https://akaricons.com/

I've been using icons from remix for a few bits & bobs: https://remixicon.com/

(https://github.com/Remix-Design/RemixIcon)

Contains more than many similar iconsets, though hasn't seen any updates in quite a while.

What was that project that combined every single iconset together and let you use any icon from hundreds of thousands of choices?

nerdfonts?

https://www.nerdfonts.com/

Iconify? I love this tool! https://iconify.design/

Related but with a lot less icons: https://icomoon.io/app/

React-specific: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/

This is also my favorite goto for icons. Also interesting to me how the repo is structured, by including a linked folder to the source repo, see packages/react-icons/src/icons .. does anyone know how to do this?

That's how Git submodules [1] show up on GitHub. I didn't actually know the project was using them. Interesting. As far as I know, this is an ideal use case for submodules, yet at least I've rarely encountered them in the web dev scene for some reason (well, IIRC there are some gotchas).

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

A direct link to the folders: https://github.com/react-icons/react-icons/tree/master/packa...

And there I was, thinking for a split-second that Feathers[1] would finally get the recognition it deserves ;-)

[1] https://feathersjs.com/

(Edit: Well, it kind of already did. Has massively more GitHub stars than when i last checked.)

https://thenounproject.com/

I’m curious how to tell if an icon pack passed any kind of i18n testing.

If I remember correctly, Material Design team did lots of i18n research for their icon pack. I assume Bootstrap icons also score well, owing to the diversity of contributors (although, I’m surprised RTL landed only recently).

Looks great. Might use them in my future projects. Currently I have been using Material Design Icons [0] for its broad icon gallery.

[0] https://materialdesignicons.com/

my list of icon resources here: https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#ico...

It's always nice to get these, and I appreciate your efforts.

Throwing my favorite set of icons out there: font awesome

I see the symbol for saving is still a floppy disk.

What should it be? Serious question.

Maybe we should ask one of those AI image generators?

(maybe an arrow into a folder, but then some new computer users don't even know what folders are because their systems don't show them to the users)

I'm also not opposed to keeping it a floppy disk. It's okay to use outdated references for things. And it's funny to hear a kid say you have a 3d-printed save icon.

DALL-E 2 yields https://i.imgur.com/B9kCRnt.png for the prompt "a graphical icon used to represent saving a file".

Not sure it's an improvement over the floppy disk. Other variations on the prompt tend to yield things like CF cards. Although I guess the file folder with the arrow isn't too bad. (For contemporary values of "Isn't too bad" equal to "Holy shit, this thing is starting to understand abstract concepts" a few months ago.)

Nothing? Autosave + undo supercedes "save". The "save" operation needed to be explicit on 1980s computers because nursing the floppy controller was a stop the world operation -- a long solved problem.

No thanks. I want writing to "disk" to be explicit.

Automatically save a copy that you can recover from, sure, but let the user decide when and if to save it for real.

Or at the very least show a list of save points with user-defined points highlighted.

Autosave is an awful idea, making modifications to existing files, creating new files "in memory" that i throw away (i.e. not saving them at all) and of course making many modifications that i decide later to save under a different name are things i do all the time with all sorts of programs.

If i want something to be stored in permanent storage i explicitly request that with the Save or Save As functionality.

That is not to say that an autosave functionality is always useless, it can be useful -e.g.- for recovering from program failures, but not as a replacement for the explicit Save/Save As functionality.

How would you save to another location? How do you save something to a usb stick? How do you save as to a different format while keeping the original?

Right idea but you're about 100 years ahead of your time. For now, thanks but no thanks.

Perhaps we should work from a different angle, we have become so used to the word "save" that we don't think about calling it something else. How does somebody who has never heard the word "save" describe saving a file? Maybe think more in the direction of "remember" or "memorize"...

Could someone who has a basic understanding of English go even two days without hearing the words 'save' or 'lost?' It seems easy enough to understand.

An icon of a brain then?

C-x C-s

What else would it be?

Q: What do the floppy disk and Jesus have in common?

A: They died to become the icon of saving.

What do you think about the icon for a new file ("file-plus") being a sheet of paper?

At that point not being a floppy disk would be confusing - when the Tango Icon Theme was used widely, it had some weird "arrow to a box" (i think it was supposed to be a hard disk) as the save symbol and despite using such programs for years it threw me off very often when trying to find and hit the save button in a toolbar. Actually it still does since some applications still use the icon set.

If it was anything else I would probably be confused.

And our "A" letter still comes from an stylized ox, even though I'm not aware of any modern language where the animal name starts with it.

That's not reason to drop any of them.

Always good to have theses, thanks for the work!

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