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Noun Project – Icons for Everything
- freekh 9y agoThis really reminds my of the glory days of clip art :) I for one really liked those so no harm meant :) The next thing is clippy coming back (oh wait that's all those chat bots) :)
- wlfmn 9y agoGetting hit with the nostalgia of flipping through a giant book and locating the corresponding disc with the icon I wanted!
- dvcc 9y agoCool, but I can't see the footer when infinite scroll is enabled to check the pricing when viewing an icon.
- criddell 9y agoWhat's the point of having a footer when you can't get to it? I see links for about and pricing that I wanted to click on, but I can't get to it. Super frustrating.
- sosodaft 9y agoTOS acceptance box and "you can send me emails" box combined. Classy. All I wanted was a bacon egg and cheese icon...
- desdiv 9y agoThe icons are embedded SVG so you can just copy and paste it from the page source. The icons are Creative Commons licensed so you don't even need to accept their TOS.
- libeclipse 9y agoThis site is sick. I mainly use it for finding nice logos for my github projects, and they really do not disappoint.
- raarts 9y ago'sick' ?
- chrisper 9y agoIt means the site is cool, hip etc.
- fiatpandas 9y agoFrom Merriam-Webster dictionary: "outstandingly or amazingly good or impressive"
- alexbeloi 9y agothe bee's knees, the cat's whiskers
- rch 9y agoI can certainly see how this is useful, but is there also a complementary site that provides the opposite? I try to avoid using icons that resemble everyday items (the 3.5 inch floppy for 'save' is a good example). Edit: there's actually a ton of good abstract stuff in here. Should have looked more closely.
- eddyg 9y agoPreviously, for ref: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843728 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498929
- everyone 9y agoLittle pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation. Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jpg http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp... (also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example) Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if though, from an aesthetic reason, I assume. Imo Text is the clearest thing you can put on a button to tell the user what that button does 'save' 'load' 'new game' etc. Yes, it will need to be translated, but thats simply putting in more work for a better product.
- arjie 9y ago> Imo Text is the clearest thing you can put on a button to tell the user what that button does 'save' 'load' 'new game' etc. Yes, it will need to be translated, but thats simply putting in more work for a better product. I strongly disagree. I'm looking at my browser chrome right now and if the back, forward, reload, home, and bookmark buttons were displayed as that, it would be _awful_. Even thinking about my IDE, if IntelliJ said "Class with main method" instead of the little C with play button icon or "Library class for which source is decompiled", it would drive me insane. That's most certainly making a worse product. It's all about the language you can create and sure, no one is going to learn a new language to play some 2 minute game, but lots of great interfaces require a new language. It's about optimizing for the experienced user instead of the newbie. Of course there are places where it should be the other way around, but it's not universal.
- ORioN63 9y agoIt's about learning the environment. You already know the meaning of the browser icons as well as you know traffic signs. On the other hand on a unknown setting, like a newly installed app, an icon can represent too many things for a person to guess which is the real semantic of the icon in question.
- yoz-y 9y agoThat really depends. Can you imagine photoshop's interface if it were all text? This is an extreme example but more generally I think text is better for discoverability but icons are better for visual memory and thus better suited for buttons in applications you use often. On desktop there are always tool tips. On touch interfaces this was not yet figured out.
- wtvanhest 9y agoThis has been around for years. I was thankful for them when I was building my now failed company. I didn't end up licensing anything, but had I got to revenue, I certainly would have. Thank you to your team.
- apo 9y agoValuable resource with many uses beyond putting icons on buttons. For example: - source graphics for figures in books and articles - inspiration for new ways of expressing an idea graphically - gauging variation in visual representation of a concept - learning how to make a particular shape with vector graphics - logo ideas
- panic 9y agoNot to mention points of interest on maps!
- tomelders 9y agoNo icons for 'schadenfreude'? Pffft, stop wasting my time.
- jtraffic 9y agoThey also have a cool API: http://api.thenounproject.com/ http://api.thenounproject.com/, which is used by automated logo services logojoy[0] and Tailor Brands[1]. I think Google's autodraw[2] + noun project would make an excellent pairing. [0] https://www.logojoy.com/ https://www.logojoy.com/ [1] https://www.tailorbrands.com/ https://www.tailorbrands.com/ [2] https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/autodraw https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/autodraw
- Cymen 9y agoAPI also used by Teespring.
- tinhangliu 9y agoI love the Noun Project! It will be amazing to have a plugin to get all their icons on WordPress
- gfody 9y agosearched for "save" .. ten pages of variations on the 3.5" diskette icon all labeled "floppy" even though diskettes aren't floppy. I wonder when a new save icon will emerge?
- roninb 9y agoIt's floppy on the inside[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Image3,5%27%27-Diskette_removed.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Image3...
- johannes1234321 9y agoThe paradigm of "saving" is going away. In "new" apps this can hardly be found. Users expect that all stuff is saved automatically all the time. Files and such are a legacy from the old desktop world.
- gfody 9y agothere were some interesting alternatives to the diskette icon if you scroll to the very bottom of the search results after searching "save" .. the micro sd card and thumbdrive icons are cool and I think pretty intuitive for "save"
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe "floppy disk" always (even with 5.25" and 8" disks) referred to the disk inside the casing, not the casing (which wasn't particularly floppy on the bigger disks, and wasn't a disk on any of them.)
- fenwick67 9y agoI always thought it came from the fact that the old 8-inchers were physically flexible.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoSo were the 5.25"s but the 3.5"s were not, and were still 'floppy disks'.
- backpropaganda 9y agoLet's go back to 1000 BC, and re-invent Chinese.
- codefined 9y agoI can just imagine some over-worked scribe attempting to draw one of the more complex shapes like: https://thenounproject.com/browse/?i=1037952 https://thenounproject.com/browse/?i=1037952 https://thenounproject.com/term/keyboard/1018886/ https://thenounproject.com/term/keyboard/1018886/ I think there was a reason Chinese wasn't based upon the images of the things they were writing about!
- WalterBright 9y agoEven the ancient Egyptians gave up on icons and assigned sounds to them, turning it into a phonetic alphabet.
- artur_makly 9y agouse them all the time. been around a while though!
- xs 9y agoI think $40/yr or $2/icon is too far out of reach for me to use these icons as a proof of concept, blog, or early website launches. I have a website idea which would use about 100 of these icons, but I can't justify the cost yet since it brings in no revenue.
- desdiv 9y agoThe icons are Creative Commons licensed so there's always the cheap-ass option of not paying them.
- Osmium 9y agoLikewise. Seems like a really great price if you're a designer, but too steep if you only use it occasionally. I use Noun Project semi-regularly with the CC licensing, but only for not-for-profit purposes, so $40 is too much. I'd probably pay a one-off fee ($20? $30?) just to use the app though, even if it meant requiring attribution for all icons used.
- colmvp 9y ago$40 is a bargain when you consider how many hours it takes for a person create an entire icon set. It's not as if illustrators are rolling in money here.
- Osmium 9y agoYeah, completely agreed -- that's the thing about the pricing, it almost seems too cheap for designers who could use it every day and create huge amounts of value, but also too expensive for casual users like myself, who aren't making a cent on anything using it. With the app in particular, even though I'd only end up using one or two icons, I'd really like to just be able to use the app to prototype/browse icons. Which is why I'd be very happy to pay a one-off fee to use the app, even if I then have to separately purchase/attribute the individual icons I use. At the moment, you have to be a subscriber to use the app.
- andruby 9y ago$40/yr isn't that expensive for "artwork". Domain names and hosting can be more expensive. Hiring a graphical artist for an hour will probably be a lot more expensive
- felixthehat 9y agoI put up a couple of hundred icons that I'd drawn previously up with a public domain license. Here are the download counts and royalties from the last 10 months for reference: http://i.imgur.com/clNZWUk.png http://i.imgur.com/clNZWUk.png
- tinbad 9y agoAre you saying creating and sharing icon sets is not a get-rich-quick-scheme? ;)
- felixthehat 9y agoAh the halcyon days of September last year when I made nearly $40. Still, it's free beer money, and a good enough way to distribute work to the public domain. It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
- wavefunction 9y agoThanks for helping society out.
- Raphmedia 9y ago> It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community. You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things. Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
- nulagrithom 9y agoFor example: https://github.com/pugjs/pug/issues/2189 https://github.com/pugjs/pug/issues/2189 Jade had to rename. They picked 'Pug' and needed a logo. christopherdowson asks if anyone can propose a logo and ends up creating the final logo. Pretty neat thread IMO.
- Phlow 9y agoWhat I really need is a quality Verb Project
- laser 9y agoWhat are you thinking? They call it the Noun Project, but they seem to cover verbs pretty well from the few examples I tried. Ex. "Bat" https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=bat&i=660766 https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=bat&i=660766 "Swim" https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=swim&i=912051 https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=swim&i=912051 "Eat" https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=eat&i=946933 https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=eat&i=946933
- WalterBright 9y agoSomeday, someone will invent this thing called "words" that can be looked up in a dictionary when you don't know what they mean.
- deevolution 9y agoIt would be nice if they implemented machine learning to cluster icons with similar style together. Then your queries could return only icons in the stlye youve selected!
- WalterBright 9y agoThere are about a million words in the English language. The site has a long way to go to get to "everything". Me, I'll stick with phonetic alphabets, which have long displaced icons. Interestingly, iconic languages usually wound up assigning sounds to the icons and were transformed into phonetic alphabets. Icons just aren't practical.
- iamcurious 9y agoOf course not. ;)
- Jdam 9y agoNice service but HUGE WARNING: Do not sign up to E-Mails, as they are super-spammy.
- STRiDEX 9y agoI read some designers discussing the filter icon usually being a funnel which doesn't do much filtering. It does funnel something into something. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=filter https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=filter interesting to see the other options that show up.
- wyager 9y agoHere's an idea; four arrows moving right, towards a line. The line has a hole in it, only allowing one of the arrows to pass through. Demonstrates filtering and doesn't have any accidental significance from symmetry.
- ovao 9y agoThere's a somewhat more simplistic version of that on the above-linked results, which is four centered, horizontal lines, each decreasing in width from top to bottom, which I think communicates basically the right idea: you have a much of this thing up here, but you can get less of that thing down here by clicking this (maybe). Conceptually speaking I like it more than a funnel, but it still needs a text label to convey the right thing. There's also a literal filter icon, which could only ever work at somewhat larger sizes due to the mesh. Without knowing that the context of the search results is that of "filter", however, you probably wouldn't know what it was by simply looking at it.
- achr2 9y agoFunnels are used for filtering all the time, think coffee, lab equipment, etc. The parameters of the filter - i.e the mesh - are what you are choosing to go in the funnel.
- jazoom 9y agoWhen I was studying organic chemistry we'd use funnels as filters all the time. I suppose most people wouldn't know about that though.
- tmaly 9y agoThis is awesome, I was actually just looking for a set of food icons I could purchase for my side project.
- qznc 9y agoI always look for the icons with multiple gears. Have not found one which would actually work: Gears not touching, size difference blocks, or three gears in deadlock. :)
- felixthehat 9y agoHey only one of my gear icons wouldn't work :) https://thenounproject.com/blackspike/collection/gears/ https://thenounproject.com/blackspike/collection/gears/
- qznc 9y agoGreat work! :)
- blauditore 9y agoSearched for "anything" - got asked: Did you mean “anyhting”? I wonder what's going on there...
- amichal 9y agoGuess: a) their misspelling dictionary is populated with past searches instead on english seed directory without taking into account if they found anything. and b) folks typed "anyhting" more often (maybe even just once) then "anything"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bbcbasic 9y agoThey even have icons for "Fuck", e.g. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=Fuck&i=54850 https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=Fuck&i=54850 Iconic karma sutra here: https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/ https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/
- tomcam 9y agoWhich mysteriously includes icons like this one: https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/164447/ https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/164447/
- tlogan 9y agoI would be using this service if they offer all possible resolutions with one click. I assume this is service which should be used by non-designers to quickly get icons for some proof of concept or similar. Am I missing something?
- prh8 9y agoYou can download SVG versions of the icons.
- Steeeve 9y agoHow does this work when you purchase a royalty free license and then use it in an open source project?
- chadpaulson 9y agoI always credit the artists, as well as the Noun Project itself, in cases like this. https://chadpaulson.github.io/react-cassette-player/ https://chadpaulson.github.io/react-cassette-player/
- swayvil 9y agoIt was inevitable. We are going to hieroglyphics.
- tjl 9y agoThat's basically what emoji are. Of course, I have a hard time telling what they're supposed to mean most of the time.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoIcon's are the written language of the digital world.
- Animats 9y agoDon't submit them to the Unicode Consortium. Please. Do not want. There are now over 2600 emoji. Enough already.
- cooper12 9y agoThe point of modern emoji is that their look is standardized though. (past the original goal of Japanese cell phone communication, the consortium seems to be concerned with filling in gaps and making sure cultures are properly represented) So emoji should (ideally) be a common set of pictograms that people can send to each other and which can be displayed interchangeable by each IME. The Unicode Consortium also has more stringent standards for inclusion. [0] UI icons are excluded. 2.6K isn't a lot, [1] Unicode has tons of room, and no one is forcing you to use them. People have obviously found use for them and it has made them enthusiastic about interacting with their tech overlords. [2] I used to irrationally hate anything popular too, until I made an effort to try to understands people's motivations for liking it and tried it myself. Emoji are the missing expressive layer of our text that express nuance like sarcasm and mirth. Sure we have emoticons, but those were limited and emoji are much more diverse and versatile. [3] Maybe you should give them a try before being so quick to write them off. I don't exactly pepper my texts with them, but I do respect people's motivations for using them and I always make sure to send a popper [4] to my friends on their birthdays. [0]: http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html [1]: Just look at how many Chinese characters there are... [2]: Campaigns to get certain emoji into unicode are quite popular, such as with the taco emoji (https://www.tacobell.com/feed/tacoemoji https://www.tacobell.com/feed/tacoemoji) and the dumping emoji (http://www.dumplingemoji.org/ http://www.dumplingemoji.org/). [3]: Eggplant emoji anyone? [4]: http://emojipedia.org/party-popper/ http://emojipedia.org/party-popper/
- simooooo 9y agoNo masturbate icon. Downvoted
- bbcbasic 9y agoAirbnb logo https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/110996/ https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/110996/