A Secret Source for Great Free Icons for your Desktop and Web Apps

Desktop and Web application needs icons. Icons make the app more usable than an all-text application. If you are building a desktop application, your framework may provide some stock icons. But if you are making a web application, you will need external icons.

I have seen a lot of pages that lists many icon sets…

• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs
• Quality mini icons
• 90 Free Vector Icons Set
• The Top 50 Sources for Free Designer Icons
• Top 50 Supercool Free Icon Sets
• Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• More Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• Free Tiny Small Mini Icons Bullets
• Icon Finder - a search engine for icons

But when I want some icons I have a better place to look.

KDE and Gnome Icon themes.

I prefer using these icons because of the following reasons…

Multiple Size Icons

Most themes provide the same icon in various sizes. The available sizes are 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 22×22, 16×16 and sometimes even a scalable SVG set. Not all themes have all the sizes - but most have. I don’t have to tell you how useful this is.

Lots of Choice

KDE Look Icons page have 86 pages with 15 icon themes per page. That makes a total of 1290 icon sets. And I am not counting the Gnome Look Icons.

That’s a lot of choice. Granted, not all will be good. Not all will have the icon I am searching for. Not all have the size I way want. There will be some duplication. But its still a lot.

Free - in both sense of the word

Most of these icons uses GPL and LGPL licenses. So you can use if for your application without paying for them. You can modify them. You can share it with others. You can… you get the idea. The point is there are no restrictions.

Even if you are building a proprietary application, I think you can use the icons because you are not compiling it into the application. But I am not sure about that - if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment.

I have to warn you that not all icons sets use these licenses - so make sure you look at the license of an icon set before using it.

Great Icons

Most of the icons are created by professional designers. Sure there are some duds among the collection - but the majority of them are good.

Some Recommended Icon Sets

Crystal Project

Nuvola

Crystal Diamond

black + white icons

Crystal Clear

And there are hundreds more for you to find out…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Design, Opinion, Review, Sites, Web 2.0, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.