While designing blogs and other web sites, I’ve often had the need for free icons that I either don’t have the skill to design myself, or don’t have the time (usually both!).
The free icon sets available for download out there are abundant, but good ones seem to be few and far between. There are a few icon sets that I tend to rely on for many projects I work on and I wanted to share those with you.
Below are a few of my favorite icon sets you can download for free. Make sure you add your favorites to the comments!
From the site:
“Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you’re sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a low low price of $0.00. You can’t say fairer than that.
Silk is, by far, the most-used icon set on the web today. So many popular web sites use one or some of these free icons, a list of them would be a post all it’s own. Virtually any type of icon you could possibly need for web site or software development is in this package. All he asks for is a link back to his site.
From the site:
Social.me is an icon set consisting of 30 individual icons of the popular social networks/Web 2.0 sites out there.
I use the Social Me icons on Good Plum (see the top bar) and have recommended them to many others. They’re simple, clean icons that can represent links to your many social profiles across the web. The Social Me free icons are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
From the site:
We’ve tried to keep a consistent style with quite a glossy look to the icons, admittedly some are better than others, but our first attempt at a set of icons I’m happy how they turned out. We’ve Included some of the main Social Media Icons such as: Design Float, Digg, Delicious, Furl, Technorati, Flickr, Stumble Upon, Twitter & Many more…
As they mention on the site, they include some of the main social media icons, but the depth of free icons is deep here – providing 128 really great web icons. All they ask in return for using their free icons is a link back to the page.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of free icon sites (legal!) for you to download. Which ones are you using? Let us know in the comments.