Free vector icons | Hacker News Reader

Free vector icons

ikons.piotrkwiatkowski.co.uk

261 pointsAshuu39 comments

Wow! I was just looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing.

I especially like the permissive license -- commercial or non-commercial use with modifications allowed and no attribution requirements. Basically, you just can't sell the icons as your own work.

That means I can actually have nice icons in this project I'm doing for work. Good stuff.

Also see FlatIcon [1] which has 1000s of icons. I've been especially impressed by their download flow. Only negative is the pagination, which is a bit pants.

[1] http://www.flaticon.com

what is the "we are working to get these available for you" link under most of the packs?

Hmm I hadn't noticed that, you still seem to be able to download the icons individually/bundled though by clicking on the download link on each icon.

It's because we're adding a button to download the entire pack. Bad wording, we should have let it empty until the button is there.

I don't suppose there's a "download all" link somewhere, where I can just browse through of my own accord?

We're adding a button to download entire packs in one click, in all formats. This should ease a lot the navigation. If you have photoshop you can also use our plugin to search directly from photoshop and insert any icon that matches your search in your project.

Hi, we will love to hear your ideas on how can we improve it, or more details into which parts are more painful. My email is my HN login @gmail.com.

Certainly! I can save the email and give you the short answer that I should have articulated better in my comment (apologies).

Basically when I'm browsing within a single pack, any sort of pagination seems unnecessary. I tend to agree with the common trend that pagination is just a bad user experience in general. Scrolling, even with a 'More' button is always better. Ideally, implement infinite scrolling.

Thanks for the great service!

You should also check out Font Awesome[1]. It's a really useful icon collection licensed under the MIT license.

[1] http://fontawesome.io/

Piggybacking on this, GlyphSearch is a tool for searching Font Awesome and several other popular icon fonts.

http://glyphsearch.com/

You misread the license: http://ikons.piotrkwiatkowski.co.uk/license.html

> Making modifications or alterations to any of the icons does not free you to then sell, license or distribute them to anyone else.

If you’re looking for something really permissive: http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/

It's worth noting that these come with a free commercial license, not a FOSS license.

That said, for what I'd use them for free commercial is far preferable to GPL.

As someone with open projects on GitHub that may or may not be a future source of income (lol), specific and succinct language on the licensing is probably your best way to ensure adoption of your product.

I just cannot be bothered to risk using an icon font in a GitHub repo only to have to bleach every trace of it, because I misunderstood the license or the author’s intent.

To help remember just how the hell the most popular “free” font icons are licensed, I created a gist: https://gist.github.com/4443939. There is no way that overview looks simple to anyone.

This is what I as a developer think about as the very first thing, when I see a collection of free-asterisk icons.

The cognitive load of parsing the legalese, especially from the standpoint of someone with zero jurisprudence is a huge toll and reason for my personal bounce rate on similar products.

Consider what the point of your free icons are (portfolio vs. seeing your icons everywhere), and how you wish to stand out (quality vs. licensing).

They say cache invalidation and naming things are the hardest thing in programming, but licensing is definitely up there; at the very least, it is something most people in the field do not—but should—understand.

+++

tl;dr: If you launch a set of free(*) icons, crystal-clear licensing should be at the top of your checklist.

I wonder why most free icon sets are licensed with attribution but most free software is not...

Perhaps designers and developers have different priorities?

> licensed with attribution but most free software is not

Let's see:

3BSD: Redistributions in [source/binary] form must [retain/reproduce] the above copyright notice [...]

MIT: The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies [...]

ASL: You must retain [...] all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices

MPL: You may not remove or alter the substance of any license notices (including copyright notices, patent notices, disclaimers of warranty, or limitations of liability)

The above sounds like attribution to me.

And here's for the elephant in the room:

GPLv3: Not required by default (merely requires an appropriate copyright notice to make the license actually enforceable), but (7.) Additional Terms may supplement the basic terms (especially for but not limited to additional material such as art). GPL is deemed compatible with BSD so there's no problem in adding such a clause, even if it is free form. Even if not required, I guess it is customary to do so anyway.

Every single SVG icon in the .zip contains every icon in the whole set... Show 4 different icons on your site? Load the whole set 4 times...

Good catch! I wonder why?

Any idea how to get around this?

Take the icons from the zip and export your own SVGs.

inspired by Batch or what? http://adamwhitcroft.com/batch/

The style is different. The glyphs are similar like chars in fonts. This shoudn't be a problem. Or is a circle with a plus sign in it copyright property of Batch ?

"inspired" not "copied".

The JPEG artifacts here really hurt. A png would also have been smaller probably.

I am not sure about the icons in the last two rows. I would bet they are certainly trademarks of other companies.

Yeah the project owner should add a disclaimer.

Of course. Most icons packs include trademarks and servicemarks of companies without worrying about the legal implications. I'm a little paranoid of legal quagmires and that's why I didn't include any of them in my Clear icon pack http://appzgear.com/products/clear-icons.htm The understanding is that anybody who wants to use the trademarks can do so by downloading them directly from the companies' websites.

Are the company specific icons on the bottom (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+, etc.) not copyrighted?

Loads of icon packs have customised versions of the social media icons. IANAL, but my reading of the situation is that the companies hold the copyright for the logos, but in general allow people to use the logos, and their own versions of them, to link to their services. So, for instance, if someone were to try to use a version of the Dropbox logo as the icon for their own software or service then they would be sued, but if they use the icon for a link to share something on Dropbox then that is alright because it is promoting their business.

Trademark law is applicable here.

In general, you can use a trademark to refer to the trademark owner's good or service. That is, you can use the Android robot to refer to Android.

Google explicitly allows use of Android robot, but disallows use of ANDROID logo (one with letters):

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

This is great, I hope he makes more. I'd especially like to see the +,-,x overlays as separate icons. Though that's easy enough to do on your own if you needed to. Still, I love this.

Windows icon, Apple icon, no GNU or Linux icon.

Also, the license doesn't seem to be a free culture license. Lame.

Linux/GNU doesn't really have a foothold in the world of design, so that it not surprising.

A cute penguin silhouette?

a webfont format would be perfect :)

[Icomoon](http://icomoon.io/) could easily convert svg into web font icons.

Take a look at http://fontawesome.io/ as well. :-)

awesome!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com