Sawse - Stir it Up!

Icons can be fun to tailor to a unique design project, but sometimes the easiest thing to do is find free or inexpensive icons to use. You can start with icon search engines like Iconlet and Iconfinder or pay for icons from sites like IconBuffet, but ultimately it is often best to find a free icon set like one of these shown and listed below to create a unified design theme on a given project. Most of the icons linked to here are free, at least for personal if not for commercial use, and they come in all sizes, types and styles.

IconBase is one place to locate some of the best icons from the best artists in the world. The icons here listed belong to the individual authors and companies. They are free for personal and non commercial use. If you are an icon artist and desire to share your work with the world, this is your place. Just click on the submit menu and follow the easy steps to add your icons. We’ll be happy to showcase your work to the whole earth.

MiniPixel Icons: These 320 mini icons are designed at 14×14px with transparent background. They are specially designed for header or side navigation buttons. Feel free to use these icons for your site (personal or commerical). However, if you are using more than 10 different icons, you must give a link back to N.Design Studio.

MaxPower lists some amazing work by various artists who have made their work available to the general public for a variety of uses. These icons are all free. There are literally hundreds of websites that will sell you icons that are royalty free for whatever purpose you desire. However, royalty free does not necessarily mean free — you still have to pay for whatever it is you want. This is because with royalty free items, the creator retains all copyrights and publishing rights. You, the average web guy, simply purchase the right to use and publish the items as specified under the terms of usage (you must agree before you can buy). Usually, these terms include a provision to not sell derivative works nor redistribute the content. Royalty free sounds great, but it isn’t truly free.

CrystalClear from Wiki Commons: Icons from the Crystal Clear icon set by Everaldo Coelho. – The icons are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). All images’ real size is 128px. These icons have an overall glossy, ‘Web 2.0′ feel and are quite varied.

BrandSpankingNew: Here are 113 10×10 greyscale icons in .gif format to fill up your stocking with - the next installment of the mini icon collection, which has been steadily growing over the last year.

Tango has designed a basic set of desktop icons that follow their style guidelines. The set has been created as a proof of concept for the style, but works rather well as a replacement for the base theme under GNOME and KDE.

Sweetie: Cute and clear icons to use in your nifty web application. They are licenced under a Creative Commons licence, so commercial use is fine. Also feel free to make derivatives with the included Photoshop documents.

FavIcons from Pics: Would you like to display your own icon on the browser address bar when visitors view or bookmark your web page? Now it’s easy to create icons for your web pages with FavIcon from Pics. Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size/resolution) for the “Source Image” and click “Generate FavIcon.ico“

Tags: favicons, graphic design, icons, tools