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Show HN: Iconduck – 100k open source icons, downloadable and searchable
- onassar 6y agoHi all; I designed a site called Iconduck (https://iconduck.com https://iconduck.com). There are so many dope open source icon sets out there. I brought a bunch of them (132 so far) under one roof. I made them searchable (using typesense.org), and list out the license details and link back to the site or GitHub repo. I'm not much of a designer, and it's just a first stab at the concept. It's been done, but I wanted to also build it API-first, since I know it would be useful to be able to search through them all for developers. I'm always on the lookout for new icon libraries to include, and plan on making it easier to learn more about the designers themselves. If you have any ideas on icon sets or libraries to include please let me know in the comments :)
- t_smith 6y agoGreat job on the launch - I'm always trying to grab new icon sets. I'd love to be able to re-color icons (e.g. black --> white) and group them for batch downloads.
- onassar 6y agoYep the recoloring should be available pretty soon, as well as batch downloads :)
- rayrag 6y agoCould you list all those 132 icon sets somewhere - iconduck.com/sets returns 404 and in iconduck.com/licenses you are showing only 1-2 set for each license.
- onassar 6y agoYep I had those listed, but ran into some performance issues. Will get that worked out (you guessed the right path, btw ;) If you want, you can join the MailChimp so that I can let you know when that page is back up: https://iconduck.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=66c12f50e51bb6247d9246ecd&id=dc2efc6035 https://iconduck.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=66c12f50e51...
- superasn 6y agoWebsite looks great and returns icons for all my searches. I hope I never have to use flaticon again after this. Their database of icons is amazing but website is so annoying.
- onassar 6y agoGreat to hear. I actually wanted to mention that Typesense very-generously is powering our search (https://typesense.org https://typesense.org). They've been soooo easy to work with, so def consider them for any search projects. Regarding flaticon: what about the site do you find annoying? This way I know what to avoid ;)
- chrisBob 6y agoOne feature I like on flaticon that you are missing is the option to download a png at a certain size. SVG is great, but if I want something quick to drop into an iOS app, grabbing the png at 64 pixels wide is very convenient.
- onassar 6y agoI'm working on that right now. Hoping to have it up later tonight ;)
- superasn 6y ago> Regarding flaticon: what about the site do you find annoying? This way I know what to avoid ;) Oh so many things but being OSS I think you'll side-step most of them by virtue. But just to name a few, the way they mix premium icons inside free icons and trick you to click it. Download limit of 10 icons or so. The graphics of a animated crying person telling you to attribute the icon. The shady exit popup windows when you click on the page for the first time. Oh so many other annoying things; only if their database of icons wasn't so big.
- onassar 6y agoThanks for the context and background. I believe one of the founders has commented in this thread, so I'll let them respond directly to that feedback. I think you're right, though, regarding side-stepping things. I'd really love for this to be a long term OSS project that could pull in a bunch of developers and designers. I don't mind contributing my time and some hardware to help w/ the problem.
- breck 6y agoLove it! Search is a little slow for me (instant search would be great!) but other than that, awesome! Especially for a "first stab!"
- onassar 6y agoThanks! The search is powered by Typesense (https://typesense.org https://typesense.org), but there's a good chance I'm not running the queries properly. Will look into that, and hope to add instant search soon.
- sanketdasgupta 6y agoWill you be open sourcing the site itself?
- onassar 6y agoHoping on it. I'm not as familiar with modern approaches to open sourcing the whole platform (I'm a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to development), but in the short term, I'll be open sourcing a ton of data for all the different icon sets, as well as little scripts and plugins I built for Iconduck.
- sytelus 6y agoSuper important: your website title should include search terms! It currently just says "Iconduck". It should be something like "Iconduck - free open source icons, images and cliparts"
- onassar 6y agoYep! Will get that data updated soon. Very much an MVP ;)
- spatley 6y agoGreat site, would love to see advanced search, especially to search within a specific icon set. Often I am building a graphic and want consistency across images, so finding an icon I like and then taking all other images I use from the same set would be super useful.
- onassar 6y agoYep! I already have that functionality done, I just haven't gotten around to building a nice UI/UX for that. On it, though.
- amelius 6y agoCheck out: https://thenounproject.com/ https://thenounproject.com/ This site has a similar goal, with a huge amount of icons already available, free to download.
- onassar 6y agoYep I know them very well! They're amazing! I wanted to build something that wasn't so much a product, but more so about the open source community and all the icons. They're a fantastic company and product, though!
- amelius 6y agoI just checked them again, and I must say that I'm a bit disappointed in how they seem to have become more commercially oriented over the years.
- onassar 6y agoYeh it's tricky. They have some pretty amazing icons and services, and probably one of the most reliable APIs I've worked with. And so, that costs $. It is a bummer, but there's always that trade off I suppose. Hoping Iconduck can fill a bit of a void when it comes to open source contributions. I'll be very consistent with it, adding new icons every week, improving the searching, and the design.
- amelius 6y agoCan't you (legally) pull all the Create Commons-licensed icons from their website? Have you tried contacting the original creators?
- onassar 6y agoDo you mean from Noun Project? I wouldn't do that (for a couple reasons). The main one, is that I want to always be able to link back directly to the creator's repo and license. It gets a bit meta when people start collecting icons from other 3rd party sites. As for whether it's allowed, I think it depends on the specific license. For example, some licenses may not allow for redistribution generally, but then may grant a special license to a provider (for example, like Noun Project). So then, you may find yourself violating a license that you didn't even know about. So the rule is, I'll only include icons that have licenses that specifically allow redistribution and attribution, and I'll almost always link back to the repo. The exception is some sets aren't hosted through GitHub or GitLab, so I'll link back to their respective website.
- slim 6y agoI was surprised the site did not have an icon, so I searched for duck and found the duckduckgo icon. are you sure it's opensource ?
- onassar 6y agoYep; those icons can be used freely, however Trademarks apply. Generally, that means you can use it (for example, link to Duck Duck Go), but you probably couldn't sell it on t-shirts
- mrkwse 6y agoThe duckduckgo icons are labelled as such. Plenty of icon sets will have recognisable brand assets for the likes of social media platforms and so on, which will allow use according to certain guidelines. Their inclusion probably isn't an issue in itself, but the blanket guidance in the copy above the result will be. > The icons below can be used for Personal & Commercial purposes. They can be used on your website, branding and designs. Obviously assets relating to existing brands will never be permitted for use in the branding of an unaffiliated party. onassar may want to update the guidelines to note such exclusions.
- onassar 6y agoThanks for the notes mrkwse. I try to show copy like the following when trademarks show up: > Naturally, trademarks apply to any brand icons or logos above. That means that you can use them in practice (for example, linking to the respective service), but that the company likely has limitations on how else they can be used. I need to do some work to communicate that better :)
- paledot 6y agoMight be worth being very explicit which icons are trademarks. Facebook is obvious to basically anyone with an internet connection at this point, but there are plenty of brands that, despite (or because of) paying 7 figures to a big name design firm, ended up with super generic-looking symbols as their logos. "Ooh, that's a great apple/bird icon, I'll just use that."
- shuringai 6y agowhy "duck" though?
- onassar 6y agoHaha fair enough. I like ducks, and thought it was a memorable name that had the domain available :)
- swyx 6y agohere's my icon cheatsheet with a bunch of similar projects if it helps anyone solve their icon problems https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#general--misc https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#gen... added iconduck now!
- onassar 6y agoAmazing thanks! Will be adding a few hundred each week (at minimum), so if you want you can mark that it's continually being updated :)
- majora2007 6y agoThanks for this, great resource. Perfect for one of my in-development projects.
- aigoochamna 6y agoAwesome-- could you provide a download link for the entire icon set? I'd prefer to have a local copy and find as-needed.
- onassar 6y agoYep that's on my todo for the next major release. Also hoping to let people group together multiple icon sets and download them all at once.
- tomcam 6y agoMaybe charge for the download all feature?
- onassar 6y agoPossibly, yeh. Tbh, there's a part of me that really doesn't want to try and productize it. I really love the idea of building an icon service that pulls in as many developers/designers as possible. OS has been a huge part of my career, and being able to give back can feel pretty fulfilling on those down-days.
- johns 6y agoIn the Windows 3.1 era I compiled different icons I could find into packs that I sold as shareware, taking $10 orders via checks in the mail and sending out 3.5" floppies in return. This is much better.
- onassar 6y agoHahaha oh boy: I may have been one of your customers. I had literally hundreds of folders of icons that I also wanted to keep offline incase the site went down. It was such a pain managing them.
- ChickeNES 6y agoYou might get a kick out of this Twitter bot then: https://twitter.com/win_icons https://twitter.com/win_icons
- onassar 6y agoHaha what I like about those icons is they're actually pretty effective at grabbing attention. That retro/throwback thing. Thanks for the link. Now I gotta find out if they're open source ;)
- pradeepb30 6y agothis is fantastic. Seems like a great resource.
- onassar 6y agoThanks! If you know of any other open source icons let me know :)
- aasasd 6y agoBy now I'm gonna need a site listing icon collection sites.
- onassar 6y agoHahahahaha
- wmab 6y agoThis is great, nice work! Who is building the Figma plugin?! :)
- onassar 6y agoHaha that's on the list! Any others you recommend?
- Fileformat 6y agoShameless plug for IconSearch [1], my similar site focused on SVG icons on Github/Gitlab. You can see my list of icon sources [2], and website source is available [3]. [1] https://iconsear.ch/ https://iconsear.ch/ [2] https://iconsear.ch/sources/index.html https://iconsear.ch/sources/index.html [3] https://github.com/VectorLogoZone/logosearch https://github.com/VectorLogoZone/logosearch
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- atum47 6y agolovely. thanks for sharing
- onassar 6y agoTotally. Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas :)
- genmud 6y agoCan you add a Copy SVG button to them? HeroIcons [1] has this and I didn't know what I was missing until I started using it. I can basically just copy and paste directly into html pages rather than download the icon and either view the xml or have to do an img tag. Sure, if there is an icon that is used all the time, I will save it, but its really nice for prototyping. [1] HeroIcons: https://heroicons.com/ https://heroicons.com/
- onassar 6y agoYep. I actually ran into that while using Iconduck to find a link & GitHub icon haha. I had to download it, then view source, etc. I need to figure out an updated preview modal UI to accommodate that and PNG downloading, but it should be very doable in the next few days.
- genmud 6y ago<3 That will be awesome. You could almost have it as a Download w/ caret dropdown for SVG, PNG, ... and then have a Copy, with options of SVG, or Icon class like for example if they do it as a font/class.
- onassar 6y agoHaha send me an email: onassar@gmail.com I've got a cool, simple UI in mind for the flow, but want to hear more about how you envision the icon class idea working.
- shubhamjain 6y agoYou can use my project [1] for this. You can copy SVG for every icon, and not only that you can use any icon directly, too. [1]: https://svgbox.net https://svgbox.net
- marc_io 6y agoLots of Open Source icon libraries here: – https://icones.netlify.app/ https://icones.netlify.app/ There are also two others that aren't on the list above: – https://github.com/bytedance/IconPark https://github.com/bytedance/IconPark (Apache) – https://github.com/boyney123/awsicons https://github.com/boyney123/awsicons (MIT)
- onassar 6y agoThanks for the links. I know of icones which uses another service. Really rad, but wanted to go a slightly different way. Already have IconPark included (http://iconduck.com/sets/iconpark-icon-set http://iconduck.com/sets/iconpark-icon-set). Adding awsicons set now :)
- sigzero 6y agoThis is an excellent resource. Thanks.
- wiradikusuma 6y agoClicking Download on any of those icons doesn't seem to do anything. I'm using Chrome on Window 10. Cancel works.
- catoc 6y agoVery nice! But no results for: https://iconduck.com/search?query=iconduck https://iconduck.com/search?query=iconduck
- onassar 6y agoHahahah v good point. I'll see what I can do about that ;)