Icons for Web and Other Businesses | Hacker News Reader

Icons for Web and Other Businesses

davidmatthias.typepad.com

68 pointsdmkov23 comments

No matter how many free icons get released I always love 'em. You can never have too many icons even if they're the same but just marginally different.

I must admit, while nice, I never understand the upvotes for such icon collections? I'd expect that if you started using them, you'd inevitably quickly find that you miss some crucial icons, which you would then commission from the original creator. So these collections are merely ads?

I wish the artists all the best, just don't understand the HN appeal. (This is also not a "not HN material" post, it's a question, as these collections appear to be a recurring thing).

Sometimes I'll upvote things, especially icon set which I don't have a need for right that second, as an ad-hoc bookmark so I can find it later under my "saved stories".

And this is why a "save story" feature should be added. I do this too and it's probably breaking the logic behind why upvote exists in the first place.

But isn't saving a story the ultimate form of upvote flattering? I'd also vote for it's existence, if only to be worth more than a mere upvote.

Would you complain if an open source code library were released that were not "complete"?

The difference is that an icon library can probably only be completed by the initial designer, because all the icons should match in style.

Not really. I've seen plenty of extensions to the glyphicons released with Twitter Bootstrap that match the style. I use such an extension in one of my projects.

I really don't see how design is different than a coding style in that aspect.

Well, that kind of strengthens his point. Open source libraries are posted here all the time and few ever make the frontpage.

I almost routinely upvote useful stuff that people create and then make available for others to use. It's almost universally positive stuff. Decent icon sets tend to be particularly useful to the more technically and less artistically oriented crowd on HN.

These are nice, and appreciated. Bought the colored ones as a small bit of support. Hope to see more in the future.

The download is one big TIFF. Is there a tool or script to cut out each icon as an individual image?

A common technique is to use a single image to limit the number of connections needed to grab them. If you want to pull them out (say, you only need one or two) any image program will let you crop (Paint.Net, Gimp, Photoshop, etc.)

Just curious, wouldn't a zip file accomplish the same objective?

He means when displaying the icons on a webpage. You use one big tiff file, which is loaded using just one connection. Then with CSS you choose which part of the big tiff file you want displayed (as an icon). Like "show the second icon on the 5th row". Try googling "CSS Sprites".

Fireworks (and I think photoshop) has a slice tool. So you coud slice them into rectangles and export them all at once.

One big TIFF is an insane way to package icons for the web. Also why use TIFF over PNG?

> One big TIFF is an insane way to package icons for the web.

Not really. You almost always would need to resize or somewhat edit them anyway. And if you care about performance, you would want them in a sprite sheet, so you need to recombine them.

Having them in a single document is much more convenient than having a few hundred open documents in photoshop.

That is relevant for the web. Really though, I think fonts are the way to go for web icons. Crisp at any resolution and CSS style-able. Bitmap icons feel a bit 2008.

> Not really. You almost always would need to resize or somewhat edit them anyway.

This would make sense if they were vector icons but because it's a TIFF you can't really do any resizing or worthwhile editing.

One other nice part about supplying it as a big tiff is that you can push out a PNG and then with a little CSS you end up with a sprite sheet. I bought the colored ones: would be awesome if they came with a CSS file.

For example, assuming the images are spaced with 200px between them:

    convert -crop 200x200 bw-smaco.tif smaco.png

Imagemagick can do anything.

A sprite sheet would be nice.

Why are there two thumbs up icons? Great work though!

Should be vector.

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