3K free SVG icons for popular brands | Hacker News Reader

3K free SVG icons for popular brands

simpleicons.org

490 pointsnoashavit92 comments

Shameless self promotion: I build a logo search engine that currently has almost 500K logos indexed: https://logosear.ch/

Also, a good source of official SVG logos is BIMI, a standard that uses DNS to point to the URL of an SVG.

Spec: https://bimigroup.org/

I recently scraped them for the top N domains: https://bimi-explorer.svg.zone/bimi/

Well done!

A couple of points.

It would be great if it listed the file format and size on the results page, so I dont have to click on every logo to find that informatino out.

How does this differ from doing a google image search of "$BRAND logo"?

It's pretty surprising looking at this list that all these sites are paying $2000+ for a bimi cert.

They’re not. Some buy a Verified Mark Certificate (e.g. ikea.{com, ca, fr, maybe others} do), but most won’t ever (e.g. the first one on https://bimi-explorer.svg.zone/bimi/list.html 026430010.co.il, and a slightly random other dailydot.com). Also the two Mark Verifying Authorities listed at https://bimigroup.org/implementation-guide/ currently talk about approximately $1,300 and $1,600 per year, less than the $2,000 you say though recurring.

I just don't see the need for sites like this, given that Iconify exists: https://icon-sets.iconify.design

They probably have >90% of all the logos contained on simpleicons, along with nearly any other icon you could ever want or need.

Simple Icons is an icon pack on Iconify

I was just about to ask if it was. That's good, because honestly fuck every other spaghetti solution for icons. It's tiring, and iconify coupled with the related unplugin-icons library solves it.

ah interesting, ok yeah that makes sense actually. thanks for letting me know!

As an alternative, I run SuperTinyIcons. They're all full colour and each icon is guaranteed to be under 1KB.

https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons

Very nice, nice set of constraints!

I was curious what the biggest would be, and was disappointed when I looked at Glitch to find its 1017 bytes was so close to the limit only because of unnecessary usage of the XLink namespace. <use href> (as the preferred alternative to <use xlink:href>) has worked across the board¹ for more than five years now. Shortening that stuff trims off 55 bytes. I also managed to shave another 11 bytes off because that’s the sort of thing I do for fun:

  <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" aria-label="Glitch" role="img" viewBox="0 0 512 512" stroke-width="0" stroke="#2800ff"><path d="m0 0H512V512H0" fill="#d0fff1"/><mask id="m"><path id="f" d="m240 266q57 3 140-26c31 5 75 32 64 10s-2-24-2-38-8-22-1-33 8-35 4-36-53 22-65 21-38-14-72-19q-10-5-14-12t-39-16-44-10-29 26q-42-2-67 12t-38 28-12 30c23 9 38 12 3 22q7 8 19 15t31 14 48 1q19 40 77 28" fill="#fff"/><use href="#f" y="119"/></mask><g mask="url(#m)"><path d="m9 9H448V406H9" fill="#2800ff"/><path d="m9 256 207 2v-11h136v12h99V9H9" fill="#f79"/><g id="a"><path d="m183 162q19 30 3 58m17 14c13-41 14-45 2-76m0 0c78 4 112 7 184 41" fill="none" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-width="8"/><circle cx="131" cy="184" r="18" fill="#fff"/><path d="m113 184a14 14 0 110 1m3 5a5 5 0 100-2"/></g><use href="#a" y="120" stroke="#f79"/><path d="m216 258v-11h136v12h99v-55H299v11H9v191H447v-82H247v11H9v-79" style="fill:#37b;mix-blend-mode:screen"/></g></svg>

—⁂—

¹ I’m only considering browsers; see https://caniuse.com/mdn-svg_elements_use_href for compatibility data. As for other tools that handle SVG, I expect approximately all actively-maintained things to support this by now, but some older tools certainly won’t. I’ll also remark that I’m getting mixed signals about how you’re supposed to use these things. If you’re supposed to inline them into HTML, the SVG namespace declaration is unnecessary (so you can save 35 bytes, and you could also then remove many of the quotation marks on attributes); but if you’re supposed to link them, the aria-label and role="img" attributes don’t do anything (so you can save 25 + name-length bytes).

Good points! Pull requests very welcome.

Seems like a lot of trademark infringement suits about to come their way. Am I mistaken or is there no way this viable? In addition, nobody has any legal right to put others trademarks (use these) on anything without the trademark owners permission. So even if the site and distribution is somehow OK, nobody can really use them anyway. Right?

These and others have been online for a while, so I doubt it. There's more here, under the Brands / Social category: https://icones.js.org/

Yes, there are ways someone could use them that would not only run afoul of the trademark, but have trademark holders come after them. However, that doesn't make this useless, because there are proper and gray-area uses of these as well.

They probably each carry their own licensing and terms of use. I'd suspect there's a good number where reuse in some situations would be permitted, and in others would not. But every single one is going to be different, and just making assumptions is a quick way to blindly assume enormous legal liability.

That's why SimpleIcons contains metadata about that, so if you are worried about that, you can just exclude any icons that have explicit licensing information attached.

If I were going to use these in my product, I would only do it the other way around. If there's no explicit license, I'm not touching someone else's trademark.

I assume most brands are happy to see their icons being used/shared on as many platforms as possible. It's just free advertisment.

If someone uses them in a context that's actually problematic for the brand, the brand can still sue them then. But that won't be the common case.

You can usually use the assets which are available on the official website, example for meta it is https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/facebook/logo/.

If you see the official logo it has different colors than the one provided in the website, so you can't that for production use cases.

Font Awesome been available since 2013 at least, featuring brand icons https://web.archive.org/web/20130608045113/http://fontawesom...

Seems fine

I always assumed Font Awesome had some business agreement with those orgs eventually as font awesome did charge for some of their icons IIRC.

Having said that, I'm not sure even that is legally necessary.

I imagine avoiding IP legal issues with things like icons could be less about signing agreements with all involved companies and more about having a team that can respond professionally to an inquiry.

Businesses may often not really understand what’s going on and default to being worried about third-party use of their trademarks that they normally must defend. Perhaps they don’t need to worry in this case, where it may actually provide a bit of free advertisement, but if there’s no one on the other side then it wouldn’t help the case.

IANAL

It has existed for years and they actively remove icons when they get a takedown request. I'm sure most companies other than Oracle are happy to be there.

Supplying the assets is not a problem. Most stock art orgs have brands. I suspect that they can get into "gray areas," if they charge for it.

Using them is the problematic part.

I'm not sure if simply offering a brand's logo would be trademark infringement.

Years ago someone contacted me at the company I worked for claiming in some sorta pseudo legal language that we couldn't have one of our competitor's logos on our website. We had it on a promotional page comparing features across similar products.

Turns out we can do that in the US.

You're mostly fine unless you are confusing consumers. The purpose of these marks is exactly to avoid that, so you're going to get into a lot of trouble if you use the marks to mislead people in any way.

Take the Air China logo - if a not-so-bright reader might think you are Air China, you're using this all wrong. But if you use an Air China logo to signify the routes actually flown by Air China on a free world map of international flights on your web site, well, yeah, that's Air China, nobody is misled, even a moron knows the little logos on your map of the world aren't actually jet aeroplanes.

It's not trademark infringement to copy or display a logo. Trademark infringement happens when you confuse customers by using a logo or phrase and make them think that you're selling the actual product or that you're somehow endorsed by the original company.

Isn't it also copyright infringement, and thus punishable by death in some enlightened jurisdictions [1], or at least by thousands in damages per infringement?

How many infringements do you generate by just loading the front page?

[1] Those most exposed to Hollywood lobbying.

Don’t tell every SaaS company ever. (Who I doubt all have robust legal processes for including logos on their homepages)

Don't tell the guy who paid $70k for icons about this!

And don't tell them about the browser inspector nor how to copy SVG code using that

I didn't want to tell you, but there is a thing called copyright. That said, if you copy SVG it is often easy to change the paths etc. and make it "yours". I guess I'd rather pay a small bit though.

> a thing called copyright

All the chatbot corps out there: And I took that personally.

What is the story? URL to read? (Search resulted in another CEO's $70K salary thing.)

Is this like Pepsi’s Million Dollar logo redesign?

It’s quite the saga, including the designer putting in their portfolio that they actually completed the project as they were ghosting their client: https://x.com/Shpigford/status/1807802947394588842

So what, he was asking the designer to re-create already existing icons? Or brand new icons for each stock?

Thats insanely fucked up either way of the designer leading them on like that or to ultimately cheat someone

Re-create existing icons, since a lot of these icon packs are not very standardized (e.g. some icons are full logos, some are actual icons, some have borders, some have backgrounds, etc).

Here is a good tweet from another company on why they made their own logos: https://mobile.x.com/tcosta_co/status/1808174493170344345

$5.00/image. The math on that is absurd unless the artist is cranking what, 20 images an hour?

Feels like they thought they had an edge, probably an LLM, and it didn’t work out.

Also feels like it took $70k to generate 14,000 requirements, or the SOW is actually shit and this is all a disaster.

Disclaimer: I don’t read twitter, if all this was spelled out in the link I apologize

If you already starting from an existing set from publicly available sources, and you just need to standardize them amongst each other for consistency, then I can see how that would be kinda reasonable, though I'm no designer myself

perhaps things like giving them a consistent center or consistent brightness/contrast could be done programmatically as well, and maybe there are end user tools to do those things en masse

other tweaks such as selecting between subtle variations found in each icon, or adding some artistic modification, shadow mimicking, etc... can possibly be done, to align the set to a certain pre-defined theme now that I think about it more

seems like a pretty interesting kinda project actually

> Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation ~Baha'u'llah

the designer who chose to instead run with the money probably got insecure or bored, but they would probably be happier if they learned to appreciate the creative process more

The guy who paid $70k to convert 14000 existing icons/logos to SVG for commercial use because he wanted to use these icons according to his product standards. All existing SVGs icons are for personal and study purposes, that's why he spent so much amount out of good faith, moral compliance and professional courtesy.

Moreover, this website has 3198 icons and what about the remaining icons as per his specifications?

One very important thing to note here is that these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License meaning you must allow users to download the source code no matter whether it's modified or not.

can svg even be "not open source"?

SVG the standard, no. SVG icons, absolutely. In the same way Python is open source, but I can write software using Python that is not open source.

But if you use it on the web, it becomes "open-source" - not by license, but for all practical purposes. Or am I wrong?

maybe if those SVGs are only used as assets inside an iOS/Android app but not on a webpage accessible via browser ....

Open source is a category of licenses.

What you mean is that it is plaintext, and can be introspected. Great for many practical purposes, yes, but in business context, you are obligated to honor the actual license.

The key to open source is the ability to modify it effectively.

To use GPLv3 definitions <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1>:

> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.

For icons like this, it’s just that there is no object code, the source code is the only form there is.

But supposing you had your SVG document with high precision, meaningful object IDs, Inkscape PowerStroke data (variable stroke thickness, which gets materialised in SVG as a path that gets fill), editor metadata and the likes, and then fed it through svgo and stripped all that stuff out, leaving just the bare bones, the original would be the source code, and the svg output object code.

To put it in the frame of another format where the difference is more stark, if you design something in Photoshop and you export it as PNG but don’t distribute the PSD, that ain’t Open Source. You can modify it, but not properly.

Or another: C, and a compiled binary. You can patch the binary, but that doesn’t make everything open source.

If you find a GitHub repository with code inside it and no LICENSE file (or any other license specifier), it is not open source.

Having the source code available is not open source nor free software.

It can get minified/optimized by a tool. The "source code" is what you immediately edit, but you might not distribute that version, only a "binary" derived from it.

Yes, unless you incorrectly assume “source is available” directly maps to “is open source”.

> these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License

The only information I can find for this collection is CC-0 <https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/develop/LI...>.

Another important point is that licenses like AGPL are (simplifying slightly) copyright instruments, and for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be creative effort, which I expect not to be the case for at least the vast majority of the icons—they’ll be mechanical translations, more or less. The original creators will hold copyright over the designs, but I don’t believe there will be any further copyright on such an icon collection, just as photographs of public domain artwork don’t get copyright protection. I am conscientious about these details, and I’d be comfortable ignoring an AGPL claim on such a thing.

Also AGPL would not be a good license for a work like this. The GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code, and quite a bit of their terms are a little difficult to apply for such a collection as this. And their nature would largely prevent anyone from using the icons unless they wanted to license their stuff under (simplifying slightly) the same license.

Thank you for the correction. It doesn't come with the GNU Affero General Public License, and the GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code.

If you can help, where can I learn more about licensing in plain English?

I find it amusing because in the past, I would have used this to find the logo of the company that I'd work for at the time.

I wonder how many employees of said brands will use this rather than their corporate environment to find an svg asset!

I’ve done this. The internal brand center was focused mostly on sales and people interfacing with customers.

I was using it for internal tools though. I’m sure if I made customer facing sites I would need to go through more official channels and make sure all the branding guidelines are followed to the letter.

Wish they'd make an SVG for my business! Hah

I had to convert and edit .ai files to get commonly used versions of our logo.

This is cool, but I wish I didn't have to get past "infinite" scrolling to check the license of the icons in the footer (it's CC0). "free" is a bit ambiguous.

Doesn't have pornhub or Brazzers, not even logo SVG archiving escapes the tentacles of the moral police (keep in mind pornhub it's one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world)

Also no Microsoft logos (top two biggest companies in the world). The moral police are out of control! /s

Except I actually looked for the other top 10 most popular websites before making my comment, they are all there (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al), as you may know Microsoft.com doesn't even make it to the top 100

Microsoft legal requested they remove their logos.

https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/11236

Please see the conversation at https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/5438, where we very deliberately tried to avoid playing moral police.

Surprisingly - No Microsoft logos. (Windows, Office, Azure, ...)

Looks like the legal team reached out and said that making monochrome icons isn't allowed [0]

0: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/11236

That's really a shitty move from MS. But, technically, since they're still in the commit history, you can retrieve them for personnal/private use.

very interesting

Adobe seems to have no problem selling monochrome logos of Microsoft products

https://stock.adobe.com/search?k=ms+word&asset_id=595866420

While it’s easier to have everything in one repo, Microsoft do have icon packs with svgs.

If you are going to use them somewhere in your online product/project, kindly check the License agreement first.

Also check the DISCLAIMER, which seems to be overriding the License:

- Disclaimer: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/master/DIS...

- License (CC0): https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/master/LIC...

Or just draw googly eyes on top and its a parody and totally legal art..

You can also have a NN turn it into a prompt and then recreate the SVG from prompt - shove it through the laundryAImat - nothing is sacred, the world they wanted they have now, let them suffer speared on there own swords.

https://svg.io/

The disclaimer is about including your icon(s) in simple-icons project, whereas the license is about how to use this project.

That's what the intro would have you believe, but if you read past it you find these bombs:

> "Simple Icons is released under CC0 - though that doesn't mean to imply that all icons within the project are also CC0. Please see individual licenses where available."

> "the absence of licence data for a particular icon does not imply that the icon is not released under a license."

Majority of the icons uploaded on simple-icons are registered trademarks and IP as well. If you read carefully what you have highlighted, this is what exactly simple-icons is trying to say.

I use these for everything, I've even corrected a couple of them as sites tend to tweak their logos all the time:

https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons

The site is broken for me on Safari (Mac), works in Chrome.

The first one I downloaded (RTÉ colour) is an invalid SVG file.

Incidentally, what is the third icon on the home page, /e/? There's a name impossible to google.

> Incidentally, what is the third icon on the home page, /e/? There's a name impossible to google.

https://e.foundation/e-os/

So degoogled you can't even google them!

The É is entity-encoded as É in the SVG, but then they generate `data:` URIs in this specific place, but don’t URL-encode the # as %23.

The odd thing is that the black and white version works fine.

Thanks, TRiG; we're working on a fix for this and should have it implemented soon. As the token Irishman on the team, that icon was one of my creations, by the way.

Alternatively: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons

For all others Try Brandfetch and their plugins in Miro and canva

I did not expect to see AEW (All Elite Wrestling) on the list.

It was added by one of our regular contributors to complement the WWE & NJPW icons already in our library.

It's far from the most niche one we have, though. My personal favourite is the Chupa Chups one, which I added on a whim a few years ago after learning it was designed by Salvador Dalí.

I read this as svg icons of size 3 kilobytes

Just what I needed today. Thank you!

Oh that's great, I'm always looking for logos for apps

Is this sarcasm? This seems like an uncommon thing to want.

Automatic like for including Beekeeper Studio :-D.

Doesn't have Grindr, disappointing.

We don't aim to be a definitive collection of all the world's brands. Rather, we only add brands that are specifically requested or contributed by our community (and, occasionally, on a whim by our maintainers!) and, so far, nobody has requested this one.

If you would like to see the Grindr icon then please do feel free to open an issue or pull request. We would ask, though, that you attempt to contact them to seek permission first as their terms of service state: "The names and logos associated with the Grindr Services are the property of Grindr. No use of these marks is permitted except through the prior written authorization and permission of Grindr. All rights reserved."

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