Ionicons – Free and beautiful icons, MIT licensed | Hacker News Reader

Ionicons – Free and beautiful icons, MIT licensed

ionicons.com

394 pointsyesimahuman95 comments

So looks like we got hit with a perfect storm of Github going down for the archive download, and the icons not loading on Firefox. Working on fixing the second one, but the repo with all the icons is here: https://github.com/driftyco/ionicons

Okay, the firefox issue was fixed and github is back. For those curious, looks like one of our new icons was not processed correctly by icomoon and ruined the whole font file. Lesson learned.

So, if you got the v1.2 version, download the new 1.2.2 version instead :)

It seems a little dangerous to include logos for various companies. I could see the likes of Reddit and Y Combinator turning a blind eye, but would we expect the same from Google, Microsoft, and Apple? I am no legal expert, but wouldn't those icons present a long term problem if this project were to truly become successful?

Font Awesome is pretty popular and I haven't seen anything happening there with regards to this situation, so this is a non-issue IMO.

I am not sure if the "But Mom, all my friends were doing it" defense will hold up in court.

In all seriousness, they are claiming copyright over an icon that is clearly meant to represent a brand's copyrighted and trademarked logo. Then they are rereleasing that logo under a MIT license. I have never gone to law school, but I can't imagine that Apple's lawyers will be thrilled by that.

I understand, but it's not always so cut and dry. Seeing that a popular almost identical non-controversial product is doing the same thing without any legal action is a vote of confidence in my book. Having been part of a hobbyist organization who has had experience with dealing with large corporations who hold copyrights (in music), I am privy to information you might be surprised at what companies choose to let slide as unofficial policy.

Different kinds of IP have different properties in different places. In particular, in some cases, the rights continue until they run out unless they are deliberately relinquished, while in other cases the rights must be defended or they can be weakened. Just because you've seen organisations let copyright infringement slide in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean they would let something like trademark use go unchallenged in the same way.

Not at all. Is common pattern for icons.

Don't many of these companies have specific terms on how their logos should be used on external sites to represent things like platform-specific apps? I'm not sure if custom-made fonts would be included in those terms, but I know these companies aren't dead set against there being no external usage.

"not dead set against .. no" is awfully hard to parse.

I don't think so. I can't really invert the "not dead set" part.

It should be 'not dead set against any external usage.'

Custom fonts are fine as long as they match the guidelines. I think they will have some issue-- mostly the ones that look different than the original icons (i.e. the white outlined versions).

https://twitter.com/logo

https://github.com/logos

https://www.facebookbrand.com/dos-donts

http://www.apple.com/legal/sales-support/certification/docs/...

Page 12 -- No go "Do not use the Apple logo alone in channel affiliate communications, including web pages." (I.e. You can't just show the Apple Icon)

https://www.dropbox.com/branding

Yahoo's icon actually doesn't look like Yahoos brand icon so I would call that one a pass

http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/b...

Pretty much no restrictions for the robot-- accept you need attribution according to Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.

http://developer.linkedin.com/documents/branding-guidelines

Linked in is specific in what the logo can be used for, instead of what it looks like. So this font is fine, but even in the preview the logo should point to a linked in page or profile.

http://www.youtube.com/yt/brand/using-logo.html

The logo the author used isn't the one trademarked-- fair use here.

https://vine.co/logo

"Use only the official, unmodified files to represent our brand." So this ones a no (though it's confusing... what if the author used the original glyph? Is conversion considered modification? I suppose)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/Tr...

Unless that glyph isn't trademarked it's not okay to use, even the logos mentioned state:

"Do not use in... Web sites for any purpose except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Microsoft."

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Promotional_graphics

Bitcoins assets are fair game.

http://dribbble.com/branding

Seems to be okay, since colors are 'encouraged' and the gylph is shown as ones that are okay to use.

http://www.reddit.com/about/alien/

Absolutely no go: "We require a license to use these logos in anything outside reddit, both for free and for profit."

---

Summing up here I was surprised to learn that the restrictions are more stringent than I thought. If I were the author I'd clean up the alternate version and remove the Glyphs that aren't specifically allowed, otherwise anyone who uses your font is technically opening themselves up to trademark violations.

I went a step ahead and included none of the social icons in my Clear icon set http://appzgear.com/products/clear-icons.htm I found each company has specific guidelines on usage of their of their trademarks/service marks with no clear mention of selling them as part of an icon set. I'm not an expert and I don't want to risk getting into a legal quagmire.

These are all trademarks, many of them registered. You must place (R) for registered and (TM) for non-registered next to the mark when you display it. These lack that. The idea is that if you don't note this, you cannot claim it is a unique and defensible mark. Hence, I'd expect that if using Apple logos in this way gained traction, you'd get some nasty letters, since by definition of trademark law, you must defend the use of your mark, if you want to retain it. That's part of why Apple will sue "Bob's Apple Store" because if they don't seek to enforce their "Apple Store" mark, then anyone else can also use it.

You're not required to use the ® and ™ marks to denote trademarks. Look at the web sites for Apple, Twitter, Facebook, etc. No ®s to be found.

IANAL but as far as I understand it, the purpose of a trademark symbol is to save you from having to send C&Ds to unwitting infringers. Your trademark doesn't lose its status just because you left of the registration symbol.

I'm disappointed that there's no penguin.

No BSD daemons, or Puffy logos either. Damn these hipsters!

Me too :) https://github.com/driftyco/ionicons/issues/22

Exactly what is the worst thing that can happen?

A violation of terms of service. Whether that warrants respect is entirely upto the author.

Perhaps not the worse thing but being sued for trademark infringement is pretty bad.

I love it and I’ll be using it, thanks. Previous similar sets of icons I found didn’t include all of the icons I needed. The main ones I need are: email, home, share, arrows, checkmark, cross, help, love, and link.

I’m thrilled that this collection doesn’t only include the old iOS ‘share’ button, but also the new iOS 7 style button.

I also like that you not only included an icon webfont for all the symbols, but also SVG files for all of the icons.

NB: Just an idea: on the website, it’d be nice if you‘d have hover tooltips for the icons that would show the description. (it took me a while to find out I had to click on the icon to see the description – to me, clicking means I will download the icon)

these icons look great. really nice work.

it seems the css for them suffers from the same glob css selectors which font-awesome switched away from in 4.x. im not entirely sure if this is really that big of an issue as people made it out to be. i wonder if ionicons will switch in the future?

here is the font awesome issue: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/568

Good point, we should tweak that. Made a GH issue for it https://github.com/driftyco/ionicons/issues/7

The ones I can see are great! I know I'm most likely not your target market but I'd want to know. http://i.imgur.com/T661sDN.jpg FF 24 - ubuntu 12.04

Sorry about that, fixing right now.

Same thing on FF 24 on windows.

I don’t want to come across as gloating, but just to add a data point: Chrome 30 on OS X 10.9 works fine. I’m toying around with the icons right now.

FF 24 on 13.10 works.

Lovely, thanks.

I have to feel like it's the end of an era when new icon sets don't include a floppy disk, though. :`/

Isn't it still a valid icon to indicate saving though? Is there another better representation of saving?

Saving being a distinct step is fading away.

That should be in there. working on it, thanks.

What is saving these days aside from "We've bizarrely held your changes since the last time you clicked this button shaped like an antiquity aside just in case you wanted to risk losing them all by navigating away."?

What's git-commit aside from "We've bizarrely held your changes since the last time you ran this command via an antiquated interface just in case you wanted to risk losing them all by accidentally running rm in the wrong directory?"

Being able to screw around with things without fear of recovering not being able to recover your original content isn't an outdated concept.

Maybe something like "please force my changes to be saved to disk now, even if your autosave would not normally sync for another little while", or "please tag the version as of this moment as a relevant consistent state"? There's still merit in the idea of "saving" even now (and even before allowing for the possibility of buggy implementations of always-save).

Oh look another page full of unicode placeholder symbols.

When did the web become a place that is hostile to people who want to choose the fonts they read things in?

I think that might have been 1990 or 1991 but I am not sure about the exact date.

What? Not sure what you mean. The fonts use unicode characters for the icons like any other icon font. Anything we could do to make it more friendly?

My point is just that icon fonts are fundamentally broken.

Why are you creating your own instead of adding to FontAwesome?

http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/

Probably because they're creating their own mobile framework and want to stand out a bit and not be cookie-cutter.

Unfortunately, the icons look terrible on my Windows machine: http://i.imgur.com/WeTwez6.png (for example)

Windows 7, Chrome 31.0.1650.34 beta-m.

Hmm, odd. Looking into it.

That's a Chrome bug - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 - been pending for over a year now

Yea, I see the same on GitHub's icons. Not sure this is something we can do anything about at this point.

Gotta love the expected Vs. Instead answers :)

Unfortunately, it fails to display in Firefox for me on either a Mac or Linux. Works in Chrome though.

Ah! Good catch, we will fix that right away.

Fixed!

Same for me. Ubuntu 12.04, Firefox 24

Great Package… You have to submit ionicons to be listed in icomoon!

Because I don't know your experience with Icons Fonts but I only use around 10% of the icons and there is always some icons missing…

For those who don't use IcoMoon, It allows you to build custom fonts picking in different packages (Font Awesome, Entypo, Iconic, …), adding your own icons uploading svg file (e.g. your logo).

This looks like a great complement to Font Awesome. Bless you for including a Cheatsheet in the download. These look great!

As an aside, I wish there was a way to search these icons sets by idea. So "Money" returns icon-ios7-pricetag and icon-social-bitcoin. (obviously I can cmd+F to look for the exact name).

Did you try that exact search? It works just as you described :) We tried to make sure you could search by generic concepts rather than just the text in the class names.

    [class*="icon-"]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this bad for performance?

Yea, we're on it :) https://github.com/driftyco/ionicons/issues/7

Icon fonts are awesome, thanks for taking the time to create these. For those interested I have a post/example project on my blog on how to use them in iOS6+. http://kenrikmarch.com/posts/4

It would be nice if people would contribute to Font Awesome instead of creating whole new sets.

What licence is FA under?

Looks like MIT, mostly:

http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/license/

I like these icons, but one suggestion - can you put a link to the GitHub repo at the top of the ionicon page? It should be much more accessible than at the bottom.

Edit: Oh, and register this on Bower!

Edit #2: And maybe LESS and SASS support please? :)

this is excellent, here it is for use in iOS projects: https://github.com/TapTemplate/ionicons-iOS

What is missing the most for my usage is all the symbols related to aeronautical domain (VOR, DME, TACAN, airport, beacon, ...). Something like http://www.eei.cena.fr/products/fonts/glyphes/orly-symbol1.g... but in beautiful vector font.

That would be cool. I'm the only aviation nut in the group and I'm not the one designing the icons, so I don't know if it would happen, but we'll see :)

When I hover over anything in Safari it disappears. https://www.dropbox.com/s/7j32ek1lmb0l6zd/Screenshot%202013-...

Doesn't load in Firefox or any mobile browser I have on iOS (Chrome, Mobile Safari & Dolphin)

Monochrome and flat. How much more ucking fugly anything could be I can't imagine.

So Ionic is big on AngularJS...is AngularJS pretty hard to learn? It seems complicated. Say if my only framework experience was a few blogs with Python and PHP frameworks plus some average JS & jQuery experience.

IMO the hardest thing with Angular is not knowing the way to do things. Hopefully our examples and recommended practices will help a lot with that.

Ben also wrote a great post describing how he built Ionicons: http://ionicframework.com/blog/building-ionicons/

Lol, thought at first that is ui8 icons http://ui8.net/ui-icons become MIT, looks same.

Is it just me or is the .ttf missing some of the icons? When I open the font in Font Book on my mac there are only a small fraction of the icons showing.

Hmm. We had some issues today so we are going through each icon and making sure everything is good and then going to rebuild the font files.

The icons look good and all.

But it's frustrating to see another icon webfont with the same (small) selection of icons as every other free icon webfont.

Any ideas on things we could add? Feel free to make a note here: https://github.com/driftyco/ionicons/issues?state=open

Why doesn't Pinboard get any love in any of these icon fonts? If they did, I'd switch from images to fonts for my personal site.

These are really beautiful! Awesome set of icons!

I just see kanji's and a some arabic characters. I checked and firefox is set to allow pages to use their fonts.

Fixed, sorry about that!

Now it works, thank you!

Nice icons.

Many of these are already unicode characters. Do the fonts of these icon sets use the corresponding characters?

A bit curious about the Ionic Framework, what are the advantages when compared with jQuery Mobile?

They look great, but the page is crashing mobile Safari (4s iOS 7) after a bit of scrolling.

I'm missing emoticons … ;)

Some of these are very nice, will definitely use them in my next project, thanks!

Would they scale up ok if I were to use them for Mac OS X apps?

Yea, they would work just fine. They look best at 16px, 32px, 48px, 64px, etc. font size.

Too bad there is no text below the icons for fast searching.

If you search any term in the box related to the icons, they will filter. Like "money" shows various money related icons.

Cool work got all social media icons one place. Thanks

Really nice icons. Thanks for sharing.

Monotone icons can never be beautiful.

Although "never" is probably too strong a word, I prefer colorful icons as well :)

You can do some cool stuff with background colors and all of that. But I agree, we'd love to do multi-color icons :)

Simple CSS tricks allow you to change the color of icon fonts easily http://css-tricks.com/examples/IconFont/

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