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Show HN: Open-core icon sets that took me 12 years to create

Hi HN, Vincent here, maker of Streamline 4.0. I spent the past 12 years perfecting icons and making the largest sets on the internet. The 5 open-source sets are: 1. User Interface Icon Set (1,000 icons) 2. Streamline Flex (500 icons) 3. Streamline Flat (500 icons) 4. Covid Icons (147 icons) 5. Nasty Icons (45 icons)

hgomersall 5y ago
I'm a bit puzzled. To use the full set commercially, do I need to pay a subscription as long as I'm using them, or only as long as I still need new icons?
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Only if you need new icons. Full details here: https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354366-streamline-premium-licenses https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354366-strea... We add new icons and sets every week.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  ~~I see the catch. Billed yearly. So the minimum you pay for access is $240.~~ ~~That may not be much for the quality you are getting, but my fontawesome infinite access pack was a lot cheaper.~~ Edit: This was wrong. The catch is that you can only download 100 icons at a time, and you can’t download any more when your subscription expires. The system tries to detects bots, so you cannot automatically download the full set.
  - vincent-lemoign 5y ago
    You can purchase for 1 month too. No need to subscribe for annual pricing if you don't need icons or illustrations throughout the year. Our design process is incredibly intensive. https://medium.com/streamline-icons/create-more-beautiful-and-consistent-products-in-less-time-4d1c1959891b https://medium.com/streamline-icons/create-more-beautiful-an... Which is why a lot of folks choose us over other icon libraries: https://streamlinehq.com/wall-of-love https://streamlinehq.com/wall-of-love If you need Purchasing Power Parity, please reach out to hello@streamline.vip.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      Make this a service that’s integrated into development tools and only bills for the icons that land into production (noninvasively by scanning them at CI stage for example) and you could get business. As of now, the price/icon is only attractive to enterprise who typically already need to design their own icons to establish identity. So you’re left with small scale who may just skip your offering for a completely free icon set.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Haha, no need. I can afford it (if I wanted to badly enough). Right now it’s at the edge of “I need an actual use case for these things, instead of buying them just in case.” I completely missed the monthly option! Buying them once for $39 and them using them forever feels shifty though. At least if I paid $240 it’d feel sort of fair ;) What is up with that 100 icons per project though? If I’m paying for icons I want to have unlimited use out of them (especially on websites), not an arbitrary limit. I doubt I’d ever use more than 100 per site, or that you’d enforce that limit, but even if it’s irrational it still bothers me.
- mirzap 5y ago
  Only for new sets, but don't be fooled. If I remember correctly, they have limits on how many icons and illustrations you can download every day. So you actually pay huge amount of money (minimum of $228), for small subset of icons that you managed to download. You can't download entire Streamline set and use it within your library. Streamline is good, I considered to use it, but it's way way more expensive than any other "Pro" icon pack on the market.
  - vincent-lemoign 5y ago
    Thanks! Yes, we have a fair usage policy that most people never hit unless you're abusing the platform.
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akmittal 5y ago
This is really nice looking icon set. material and FA look too generic these days. Thanks for creating this.
nudpiedo 5y ago
I find great that it is a paid asset, specially seeing such a huge library of icons. However why a subscription model? For this price I guess only mid large studios can afford them, and they may compare it to other asset libraries like the ones from adobe, etc. Also it is not clear to me what is the license, if I create a product for a customer and I stop the subscription I guess this product can still use the icons I put them there. Anyway, congratulations for the product, I bookmark it.
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  1. Subscription: Moving to a subscription was a hard decision and we thought about it for 2 years, but it allowed us to focus on producing more content and improving workflow features like a figma plugin, global color editor, CSS color editor etc. I wrote all about it in a Medium post. 2. Thanks for letting me know that the licensing isn't as clear. You're absolutely right in assuming that your customers can continue using the icons even if you cancel the subscription.
  - zauguin 5y ago
    Please also make the open-source licensing clearer. I couldn't figure out which license they are actually under. It refers to CC 4.0, but creative commons currently has 6 different licenses in version 4.0.
    - vincent-lemoign 5y ago
      We had licensed the 5 icon sets, Bangalore and Freemoji sets under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 which lets you use them as you want. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ I'll take a look what are the other 6 licenses and make our licensing information clearer. Thank you. I appreicate this.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
NetOpWibby 5y ago
I like your mini icons, very nice. I currently use Symbolicons.
napolux 5y ago
Lovely. Can you share some numbers about revenue? I'm really curious
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Congrats, 12 years is a long time. Hope you don't need to start over seeing as there are diskette and even tape icons that might cause millenials and up to scratch heads. But then it looks you're enjoying finding new graphic representations for UI concepts ;)
aktenlage 5y ago
Wow, they all look very good. I totally love the streamline freehand icon set, bravo!
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Thank you! Freehand, Cyber and Pixel are a few of the really unique styles.
pabs3 5y ago
Which open source license are they released under?
- deleted 5y ago
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- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Those 5 icon sets, Bangalore and Freemoji sets are all licensed under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 which lets you use them as you want. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Other premium icon sets aren't open-source, so using them would require a backlink or a purchase.
  - ghosty141 5y ago
    What does Open Source even mean in this context? To me this would mean getting the source files for the icons.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - prmoustache 5y ago
    Creative Commons licenses aren't open source licences. Your phrasing is misleading. They are however copyleft as they allow for redistribution and modification and this is the word you should be using.
    - zauguin 5y ago
      CC BY is not a copyleft license. Copyleft is explicitly about the requirement to use the same license for modifications, which is present in CC BY-SA, but not in CC BY. CC BY is recognized by the FSF as a free license and by Debian as DFSG-free. While it's not listed by the OSI as open-source, I think that's mostly because it's not a code license. So I don't think that calling it a open source license is misleading. Of course, for open source icons I would actually expect the source files to be open...
charcircuit 5y ago
It took almost exactly 1 hour to make each icon. 12*365*24/104600 = ~1.005 (1 hour and ~18 seconds)
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Love that you did the math. This is the kind of content I come to HN for. Although, I'd do it differently since I didn't work for 24 hours a day. I'll also account for our open-source illustration and emoji sets. So, (12 years * 12 months * 4 weeks * 40 hour work week )/(104600 icons + 2322 emoji + 24863 illustrations). Streamline now has a team of 15 people so I'm not the only one doing it all by myself :)
throwaway81523 5y ago
I found this annoying and spammy. It took me almost a dozen clicks to find out where to buy the premium license, and there it says "contact us for a quote" instead of saying what the price is. I'll defer to others about whether this type of post (on the other site we used to call it a slashvertisement) is appropriate for HN but I'm personally not keen on it. I think if I wanted this type of product I could find it myself.
- jamil7 5y ago
  Are we looking at the same website? There's a big green button at the bottom of the page that takes you to a pricing page with three pricing tiers and the price in USD.
  - MarvinYork 5y ago
    There‘s nothing on mobile.
    - thevinter 5y ago
      "UPGRADE" button. Not obvious but it's there
    - jamil7 5y ago
      Ah OK, well OP is in the thread somewhere so maybe they'll take note and update it on mobile.
    - kome 5y ago
      the web is for computers :)
      - PetahNZ 5y ago
        What? Doesnt mobile dominate web traffic now days?
      - deleted 5y ago
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ignoramous 5y ago
Thanks. Please consider indexing your sets on iconduck.com
michaklang 5y ago
Congrats!!
cbrwizard 5y ago
What I love about Streamline is consistency. Choose a set and it has enough icons or illustrations to fill a website of any size. At the same time there are numerous sets so you can find one for any use case.
torstenvl 5y ago
I love these icons, great work. I also found the licensing confusing. You say it's under CC 4.0 but don't specify. When digging deeper it appears you mean CC BY 4.0, but then you link to another page that places specific restrictions on the type of attribution, which CC BY does not do. What's more, some of these restrictions are onerous, e.g., requiring attribution in an image's text description or requiring a link to your page. Again, that is inconsistent with the license you claim to use, and what's more is you don't have a policy posted on referrer tracking, so for all we know you're essentially requiring telemetry. In my estimation, you won't get a lot of people using these until you clear up the licensing. While your icons are beautiful (again, great work!) it isn't worth the legal risk.
- deleted 5y ago
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- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Oh no, I'll get this fixed asap. Those 5 icon sets, Bangalore and Freemoji sets are all licensed under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 which lets you use them as you want. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Other premium icon sets aren't open-source, so using them would require a backlink or a purchase.
graycat 5y ago
Oops, the HN audience really likes icons.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "Have no reasonable and reliable way to determine what they mean." Except for wide practice? How many people who work with mobile phones cannot really determine what the icon for Wi-Fi means? "So, just suggesting that the Roman alphabet was a step forward from icons and returning to icons is a step backwards." Backward and forward with respect to what? Writing language down in an alphabet is more precise, but only other speakers of the same languge will be able to communicate with you. Symbolic writing is less precise, but more intelligible to people who do not speak your language. Would China hold together if they didn't have a common symbolic writing system? The languages (or dialects) spoken in the country are very different from one another.
  - scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    > Except for wide practice? How many people who work with mobile phones cannot really determine what the icon for Wi-Fi means? But that's the problem. You don't know what the icon for Wi-Fi means, until you do.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Same with the alphabet. Someone has to teach you what A means and how is it pronounced. That is quite a normal task in human civilization, we do not come out of the womb pre-programmed to be literate.
      - 6510 5y ago
        I told someone who uses a phone most hours of the day for decades to click the hamburger menu. "What?" I said the 3 lines at the top in the corner. "Oh wtf? I never knew there was a menu there." In marketing the goal is to, every step of the way, not lose customers. Basically: You want to sell stuff or attempt to teach stuff? If a simple hamburger already is < 100% everything else must be terrible. More than 0% wont be able to see the little house as a link to the front page while something like "home" would work for an English audience 100% of the time.
deanc 5y ago
Hi Vincent. These look great. I really like the soft edges and curves, subtle but not too subtle as to make them look comic-book like. Very nice
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Thank you! <3
asddubs 5y ago
your "unlock 120k icons" prompt covers some of the text at the very bottom of the page (as in if you've reached the scroll end), maybe you should add some margin/padding at the bottom
po1nter 5y ago
I'm not sure about the subscription model. Everything is a subscription these days and I think it's a bad thing because if you've already made the icons then just set a fixed price. Made new icons? create a new version and charge for it.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  I agree with your emotion, as an individual I also worry about the trend away from ownership. But this is targeted at companies, who definitely need to be able to pay the fee, right? (even tiny ones) For comparison, we pay Hoefler a similar recurring fee for using one font on our website and in our app. I think it's fair. Designing good fonts or icon sets is hard work, and a few hundred euros a year for what's a fundamental part of our marketing and image is a pretty good deal.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    One thing is whether they can pay, the other is the process - especially for big orgs each bill has a huge overheaf to check and make the payment, anf the responsible teams have to justify the expense regularly.
    - skrebbel 5y ago
      So badly built red tape at huge orgs is why individual designers should give their work away for free? Come on.
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mechero 5y ago
Congrats, all these icons and illustrations look great! I have a question, what's the difference for example between "UI Icons Line - Free" and "UI Icons Line - Pro" when using them for free? I think I'm not understanding the license, I could download icons from both and put the attribution the same way, couldn't I?
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Great question! UI Icons Line - Free is licensed under Licensed under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0. UI Icons Line - Pro has more icons than the free counterpart. You can only download low-res PNGs for free, actually. See the part about free license limitations here: https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354376-streamline-free-license https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354376-strea....
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xunn0026 5y ago
I have learned to stay away from open-core icon sets. It seems like they are doing a very nice balancing act where the icons you need later on happen to be in the paid section. I also dislike this is promoted as an open source icon set. This is a commercial product providing free samples. By design, it has a funnel of free / 'open source' users of which some will be turned into customers. Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech. It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. But basically this is how graphics / icons / page templates / etc are being marketed. I guess this is where any kind of 'community' helps. If a library has a community, it would be forked the 2nd day if it tries to pull something like this. But icons / templates / graphics are generally the work of a single person or small group of persons. There is no community that may philosophically decide they disagree and thus fork the project on new license terms. All in all, quite depressing. But, I understand, we all need to eat.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  > It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. Unfortunately this is frequently the case in programs and libraries: GraalVM has commercial-only optimizations, Qt has commercial licensing and proprietary modules, SQL/NoSQL/caching databases, search indexers, etc.
- andygroundwater 5y ago
  > It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. It's occurred to plenty of others - look at the GPT-3 libraries or a few of the more advanced Deep Learning ones.
  - spi 5y ago
    Deep learning libraries are free; GPT-3 is not a library, it's a pretrained model. It's offered (for a fee) through an API. The company offering it (as much as I dislike their naming OpenAI, while being all but open) spent considerable amount of money training it, and is paying more in hardware costs for each instance you send through their API. Actually, even though training models is very expensive, most models are even available online for free! A large collection is on HuggingFace (including GPT-2, which is essentially a smaller GPT-3), and there are studies proving that the quality is essentially the same. You can literally just download and run them, pretty much like... a free library.
smashah 5y ago
Nice work! Ignore the "open source" puritans.
mettamage 5y ago
Wait, are the commercially licensed icon sets also open-source? If not, then the title is too misleading IMO. I don't think it took you 12 years to create the free icons right? It took you 12 years to create all the icons (free and commercial).
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  We create, refine and improve our icons over time. Some of the open source icons have been improved 4 times over the course of 12 years. Not all sets are open-source.
samuelstros 5y ago
Why is this open-source? Neither is the source of the (free) icons available, nor is the license (CC 4.0) approved by OSI as "open source". Don't get me wrong I am not an evangelist praising the OSI. But not even having the source (figma/sketch files, repository) available definitely abuses the term open source.
- oefrha 5y ago
  SVG is arguably a fairly easily editable source form for simple icons.
  - edf13 5y ago
    Being able to edit something doesn't give it open source credentials....
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Figma, github repositories are available. https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/R... We still think they are open-source but totally okay with us having different opinions.
  - samuelstros 5y ago
    Put links to the source on your website. I searched for multiple minutes and haven't found anything.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  CC-BY 4.0 is a perfectly good open license for non-source-code. OSI lists licenses for code, which is why it doesn’t list CC 4.0 licenses. Finally, go check out the license for the OSI website. It’s CC-BY 4.0, same as this. It’s not even at the degree of sleight of hand as treating dy/dx as a fraction. It’s perfectly cromulent, not abusive of “open source” and perfectly in line with the principles. I know the HN community is huge on being negative and stuff but come on, man. If you’re going to be all “abuses the term open source” and shit like that, at least bother to have some basic knowledge.
thyrox 5y ago
The definition of open source is getting blurry day by day. Just today I was looking for an infinite scroll JavaScript library and even though it's oss with 7k+ github star, you still need to buy a commercial licence to use it. I really wish we had separate open source licence for such projects which require a commercial use licence. (1) https://infinite-scroll.com/ https://infinite-scroll.com/
- midasuni 5y ago
  It’s a bit confusing but it reads to me that the code is GPL3, so whats the problem?
- saladuh 5y ago
  The definition of open source requires that you must be allowed to use the software for commercial purposes. While this library does have a commercial license available, it is dual licensed under the GPL 3.0, which is an open source license that allows for commercial use. Therefore it is open source, and of course allows you to use the product in a commercial product, provided you comply with the GPL.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Open source doesn't mean, that you can use it however you wish to use it. It means that the source is open. This allows for audits and reading the code, perhaps knowing what the tool / library actually does. What you are allowed to do with it however, is a different matter. If you are looking for something with more ethics and agenda, maybe you are looking for free/libre software.
  - fermigier 5y ago
    "It means that the source is open." -> Nope. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition for instance: "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code."
    - zelphirkalt 5y ago
laurent123456 5y ago
The title is quite disingenuous. They make it sound like it's someone personal open source project, when clearly it's a commercial venture ran by multiple people. This title should be changed.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
I work a lot with icons, even submitted some of my own design to materialdesignicons set. These sets look nice. However, that's the only good thing about them. Subscription model is ridiculous for this sort of things, licensing is unclear. So I'll pass on using them.
thepra 5y ago
Really? No font version or single svg file with #ids pointers?
kolla 5y ago
I don't think the author understands what open source is.
wjdp 5y ago
Any way to download the whole set? What keeps me using Font Awesome is the npm packages and ease of integration into frontend frameworks. This set it seems you need to download each icon you want to use, copy into project &c.
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  We did have an NPM package a few months ago but had to deprecate it. You can search and multi-select the icons you need. Here's a quick gif on how to do that: https://twitter.com/streamlinehq/status/1488139311128391683 https://twitter.com/streamlinehq/status/1488139311128391683
qwertox 5y ago
This is nothing but an ad.
vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Anyone know how we can change the title though?
koustubhs 5y ago
How is this Open Source? These are proprietary icons being peddled as open source.
masa331 5y ago
For anybody just looking for nice icons instead of a open-source discussion i can also recommend https://icons8.com https://icons8.com. They are the same freemium model as these
Jasp3r 5y ago
Nice design but how do I use your icons? Do I manually have to download every single SVG? You seem to have a collection feature, which requires some mouse acrobatics and a lot of clicks and patience, but even there it's not possible to export multiple icons to an iconfont whatsoever.
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  You can multi-select and download too or get it via github/figma. https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/R... https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 We still recommend using the app just because we keep improving icons frequently.
  - Jasp3r 5y ago
    May I ask why you can't download it from your collection page, it would make the most sense to me. Thanks for the links! I didn't even know it was hosted on github as your main site doesn't link to it. I tried the Streamline Icons plugin for figma, but it doesn't work: "Oh no! An error has occurred. The dev team has been notified."
    - vincent-lemoign 5y ago
      Agree, we should add the links on the main site so it's clearer. But, it seems like a step back if you need to use figma file or github to search when you can use our app. The figma plugin works on my end. I've asked the dev team to look into it but in the meantime can you recheck on your end if the error persists?
karmakaze 5y ago
Could be a very interesting collection. What it really needs is an search function or tag name autocomplete. I'm not about to 'browse' through thousands of tags to find relevant ones. Cmd-F helps, but why is that necessary?
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  there is a search function right up at the top. There's global search and individual set search available. Are you not able to find that?

hgomersall 5y ago

I'm a bit puzzled. To use the full set commercially, do I need to pay a subscription as long as I'm using them, or only as long as I still need new icons?

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Only if you need new icons. Full details here: https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354366-streamline-premium-licenses https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354366-strea... We add new icons and sets every week.
Aeolun 5y ago
~~I see the catch. Billed yearly. So the minimum you pay for access is $240.~~ ~~That may not be much for the quality you are getting, but my fontawesome infinite access pack was a lot cheaper.~~ Edit: This was wrong. The catch is that you can only download 100 icons at a time, and you can’t download any more when your subscription expires. The system tries to detects bots, so you cannot automatically download the full set.
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  You can purchase for 1 month too. No need to subscribe for annual pricing if you don't need icons or illustrations throughout the year. Our design process is incredibly intensive. https://medium.com/streamline-icons/create-more-beautiful-and-consistent-products-in-less-time-4d1c1959891b https://medium.com/streamline-icons/create-more-beautiful-an... Which is why a lot of folks choose us over other icon libraries: https://streamlinehq.com/wall-of-love https://streamlinehq.com/wall-of-love If you need Purchasing Power Parity, please reach out to hello@streamline.vip.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Make this a service that’s integrated into development tools and only bills for the icons that land into production (noninvasively by scanning them at CI stage for example) and you could get business. As of now, the price/icon is only attractive to enterprise who typically already need to design their own icons to establish identity. So you’re left with small scale who may just skip your offering for a completely free icon set.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Haha, no need. I can afford it (if I wanted to badly enough). Right now it’s at the edge of “I need an actual use case for these things, instead of buying them just in case.” I completely missed the monthly option! Buying them once for $39 and them using them forever feels shifty though. At least if I paid $240 it’d feel sort of fair ;) What is up with that 100 icons per project though? If I’m paying for icons I want to have unlimited use out of them (especially on websites), not an arbitrary limit. I doubt I’d ever use more than 100 per site, or that you’d enforce that limit, but even if it’s irrational it still bothers me.
mirzap 5y ago
Only for new sets, but don't be fooled. If I remember correctly, they have limits on how many icons and illustrations you can download every day. So you actually pay huge amount of money (minimum of $228), for small subset of icons that you managed to download. You can't download entire Streamline set and use it within your library. Streamline is good, I considered to use it, but it's way way more expensive than any other "Pro" icon pack on the market.
- vincent-lemoign 5y ago
  Thanks! Yes, we have a fair usage policy that most people never hit unless you're abusing the platform.

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akmittal 5y ago

This is really nice looking icon set. material and FA look too generic these days. Thanks for creating this.

nudpiedo 5y ago

I find great that it is a paid asset, specially seeing such a huge library of icons. However why a subscription model? For this price I guess only mid large studios can afford them, and they may compare it to other asset libraries like the ones from adobe, etc. Also it is not clear to me what is the license, if I create a product for a customer and I stop the subscription I guess this product can still use the icons I put them there. Anyway, congratulations for the product, I bookmark it.

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
1. Subscription: Moving to a subscription was a hard decision and we thought about it for 2 years, but it allowed us to focus on producing more content and improving workflow features like a figma plugin, global color editor, CSS color editor etc. I wrote all about it in a Medium post. 2. Thanks for letting me know that the licensing isn't as clear. You're absolutely right in assuming that your customers can continue using the icons even if you cancel the subscription.
- zauguin 5y ago
  Please also make the open-source licensing clearer. I couldn't figure out which license they are actually under. It refers to CC 4.0, but creative commons currently has 6 different licenses in version 4.0.
  - vincent-lemoign 5y ago
    We had licensed the 5 icon sets, Bangalore and Freemoji sets under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 which lets you use them as you want. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ I'll take a look what are the other 6 licenses and make our licensing information clearer. Thank you. I appreicate this.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago

NetOpWibby 5y ago

I like your mini icons, very nice. I currently use Symbolicons.

napolux 5y ago

Lovely. Can you share some numbers about revenue? I'm really curious

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Congrats, 12 years is a long time. Hope you don't need to start over seeing as there are diskette and even tape icons that might cause millenials and up to scratch heads. But then it looks you're enjoying finding new graphic representations for UI concepts ;)

aktenlage 5y ago

Wow, they all look very good. I totally love the streamline freehand icon set, bravo!

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Thank you! Freehand, Cyber and Pixel are a few of the really unique styles.

pabs3 5y ago

Which open source license are they released under?

deleted 5y ago
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vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Those 5 icon sets, Bangalore and Freemoji sets are all licensed under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 which lets you use them as you want. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Other premium icon sets aren't open-source, so using them would require a backlink or a purchase.
- ghosty141 5y ago
  What does Open Source even mean in this context? To me this would mean getting the source files for the icons.
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- prmoustache 5y ago
  Creative Commons licenses aren't open source licences. Your phrasing is misleading. They are however copyleft as they allow for redistribution and modification and this is the word you should be using.
  - zauguin 5y ago
    CC BY is not a copyleft license. Copyleft is explicitly about the requirement to use the same license for modifications, which is present in CC BY-SA, but not in CC BY. CC BY is recognized by the FSF as a free license and by Debian as DFSG-free. While it's not listed by the OSI as open-source, I think that's mostly because it's not a code license. So I don't think that calling it a open source license is misleading. Of course, for open source icons I would actually expect the source files to be open...

charcircuit 5y ago

It took almost exactly 1 hour to make each icon. 12*365*24/104600 = ~1.005 (1 hour and ~18 seconds)

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Love that you did the math. This is the kind of content I come to HN for. Although, I'd do it differently since I didn't work for 24 hours a day. I'll also account for our open-source illustration and emoji sets. So, (12 years * 12 months * 4 weeks * 40 hour work week )/(104600 icons + 2322 emoji + 24863 illustrations). Streamline now has a team of 15 people so I'm not the only one doing it all by myself :)

throwaway81523 5y ago

I found this annoying and spammy. It took me almost a dozen clicks to find out where to buy the premium license, and there it says "contact us for a quote" instead of saying what the price is. I'll defer to others about whether this type of post (on the other site we used to call it a slashvertisement) is appropriate for HN but I'm personally not keen on it. I think if I wanted this type of product I could find it myself.

jamil7 5y ago
Are we looking at the same website? There's a big green button at the bottom of the page that takes you to a pricing page with three pricing tiers and the price in USD.
- MarvinYork 5y ago
  There‘s nothing on mobile.
  - thevinter 5y ago
    "UPGRADE" button. Not obvious but it's there
  - jamil7 5y ago
    Ah OK, well OP is in the thread somewhere so maybe they'll take note and update it on mobile.
  - kome 5y ago
    the web is for computers :)
    - PetahNZ 5y ago
      What? Doesnt mobile dominate web traffic now days?
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ignoramous 5y ago

Thanks. Please consider indexing your sets on iconduck.com

michaklang 5y ago

Congrats!!

cbrwizard 5y ago

What I love about Streamline is consistency. Choose a set and it has enough icons or illustrations to fill a website of any size. At the same time there are numerous sets so you can find one for any use case.

torstenvl 5y ago

I love these icons, great work. I also found the licensing confusing. You say it's under CC 4.0 but don't specify. When digging deeper it appears you mean CC BY 4.0, but then you link to another page that places specific restrictions on the type of attribution, which CC BY does not do. What's more, some of these restrictions are onerous, e.g., requiring attribution in an image's text description or requiring a link to your page. Again, that is inconsistent with the license you claim to use, and what's more is you don't have a policy posted on referrer tracking, so for all we know you're essentially requiring telemetry. In my estimation, you won't get a lot of people using these until you clear up the licensing. While your icons are beautiful (again, great work!) it isn't worth the legal risk.

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vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Oh no, I'll get this fixed asap. Those 5 icon sets, Bangalore and Freemoji sets are all licensed under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 which lets you use them as you want. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Other premium icon sets aren't open-source, so using them would require a backlink or a purchase.

graycat 5y ago

Oops, the HN audience really likes icons.

inglor_cz 5y ago
"Have no reasonable and reliable way to determine what they mean." Except for wide practice? How many people who work with mobile phones cannot really determine what the icon for Wi-Fi means? "So, just suggesting that the Roman alphabet was a step forward from icons and returning to icons is a step backwards." Backward and forward with respect to what? Writing language down in an alphabet is more precise, but only other speakers of the same languge will be able to communicate with you. Symbolic writing is less precise, but more intelligible to people who do not speak your language. Would China hold together if they didn't have a common symbolic writing system? The languages (or dialects) spoken in the country are very different from one another.
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  > Except for wide practice? How many people who work with mobile phones cannot really determine what the icon for Wi-Fi means? But that's the problem. You don't know what the icon for Wi-Fi means, until you do.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Same with the alphabet. Someone has to teach you what A means and how is it pronounced. That is quite a normal task in human civilization, we do not come out of the womb pre-programmed to be literate.
    - 6510 5y ago
      I told someone who uses a phone most hours of the day for decades to click the hamburger menu. "What?" I said the 3 lines at the top in the corner. "Oh wtf? I never knew there was a menu there." In marketing the goal is to, every step of the way, not lose customers. Basically: You want to sell stuff or attempt to teach stuff? If a simple hamburger already is < 100% everything else must be terrible. More than 0% wont be able to see the little house as a link to the front page while something like "home" would work for an English audience 100% of the time.

deanc 5y ago

Hi Vincent. These look great. I really like the soft edges and curves, subtle but not too subtle as to make them look comic-book like. Very nice

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Thank you! <3

asddubs 5y ago

your "unlock 120k icons" prompt covers some of the text at the very bottom of the page (as in if you've reached the scroll end), maybe you should add some margin/padding at the bottom

po1nter 5y ago

I'm not sure about the subscription model. Everything is a subscription these days and I think it's a bad thing because if you've already made the icons then just set a fixed price. Made new icons? create a new version and charge for it.

skrebbel 5y ago
I agree with your emotion, as an individual I also worry about the trend away from ownership. But this is targeted at companies, who definitely need to be able to pay the fee, right? (even tiny ones) For comparison, we pay Hoefler a similar recurring fee for using one font on our website and in our app. I think it's fair. Designing good fonts or icon sets is hard work, and a few hundred euros a year for what's a fundamental part of our marketing and image is a pretty good deal.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  One thing is whether they can pay, the other is the process - especially for big orgs each bill has a huge overheaf to check and make the payment, anf the responsible teams have to justify the expense regularly.
  - skrebbel 5y ago
    So badly built red tape at huge orgs is why individual designers should give their work away for free? Come on.
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mechero 5y ago

Congrats, all these icons and illustrations look great! I have a question, what's the difference for example between "UI Icons Line - Free" and "UI Icons Line - Pro" when using them for free? I think I'm not understanding the license, I could download icons from both and put the attribution the same way, couldn't I?

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Great question! UI Icons Line - Free is licensed under Licensed under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0. UI Icons Line - Pro has more icons than the free counterpart. You can only download low-res PNGs for free, actually. See the part about free license limitations here: https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354376-streamline-free-license https://intercom.help/streamlinehq/en/articles/5354376-strea....

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xunn0026 5y ago

I have learned to stay away from open-core icon sets. It seems like they are doing a very nice balancing act where the icons you need later on happen to be in the paid section. I also dislike this is promoted as an open source icon set. This is a commercial product providing free samples. By design, it has a funnel of free / 'open source' users of which some will be turned into customers. Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech. It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. But basically this is how graphics / icons / page templates / etc are being marketed. I guess this is where any kind of 'community' helps. If a library has a community, it would be forked the 2nd day if it tries to pull something like this. But icons / templates / graphics are generally the work of a single person or small group of persons. There is no community that may philosophically decide they disagree and thus fork the project on new license terms. All in all, quite depressing. But, I understand, we all need to eat.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
> It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. Unfortunately this is frequently the case in programs and libraries: GraalVM has commercial-only optimizations, Qt has commercial licensing and proprietary modules, SQL/NoSQL/caching databases, search indexers, etc.
andygroundwater 5y ago
> It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. It's occurred to plenty of others - look at the GPT-3 libraries or a few of the more advanced Deep Learning ones.
- spi 5y ago
  Deep learning libraries are free; GPT-3 is not a library, it's a pretrained model. It's offered (for a fee) through an API. The company offering it (as much as I dislike their naming OpenAI, while being all but open) spent considerable amount of money training it, and is paying more in hardware costs for each instance you send through their API. Actually, even though training models is very expensive, most models are even available online for free! A large collection is on HuggingFace (including GPT-2, which is essentially a smaller GPT-3), and there are studies proving that the quality is essentially the same. You can literally just download and run them, pretty much like... a free library.

smashah 5y ago

Nice work! Ignore the "open source" puritans.

mettamage 5y ago

Wait, are the commercially licensed icon sets also open-source? If not, then the title is too misleading IMO. I don't think it took you 12 years to create the free icons right? It took you 12 years to create all the icons (free and commercial).

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
We create, refine and improve our icons over time. Some of the open source icons have been improved 4 times over the course of 12 years. Not all sets are open-source.

samuelstros 5y ago

Why is this open-source? Neither is the source of the (free) icons available, nor is the license (CC 4.0) approved by OSI as "open source". Don't get me wrong I am not an evangelist praising the OSI. But not even having the source (figma/sketch files, repository) available definitely abuses the term open source.

oefrha 5y ago
SVG is arguably a fairly easily editable source form for simple icons.
- edf13 5y ago
  Being able to edit something doesn't give it open source credentials....
vincent-lemoign 5y ago
Figma, github repositories are available. https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/R... We still think they are open-source but totally okay with us having different opinions.
- samuelstros 5y ago
  Put links to the source on your website. I searched for multiple minutes and haven't found anything.
renewiltord 5y ago
CC-BY 4.0 is a perfectly good open license for non-source-code. OSI lists licenses for code, which is why it doesn’t list CC 4.0 licenses. Finally, go check out the license for the OSI website. It’s CC-BY 4.0, same as this. It’s not even at the degree of sleight of hand as treating dy/dx as a fraction. It’s perfectly cromulent, not abusive of “open source” and perfectly in line with the principles. I know the HN community is huge on being negative and stuff but come on, man. If you’re going to be all “abuses the term open source” and shit like that, at least bother to have some basic knowledge.

thyrox 5y ago

The definition of open source is getting blurry day by day. Just today I was looking for an infinite scroll JavaScript library and even though it's oss with 7k+ github star, you still need to buy a commercial licence to use it. I really wish we had separate open source licence for such projects which require a commercial use licence. (1) https://infinite-scroll.com/ https://infinite-scroll.com/

midasuni 5y ago
It’s a bit confusing but it reads to me that the code is GPL3, so whats the problem?
saladuh 5y ago
The definition of open source requires that you must be allowed to use the software for commercial purposes. While this library does have a commercial license available, it is dual licensed under the GPL 3.0, which is an open source license that allows for commercial use. Therefore it is open source, and of course allows you to use the product in a commercial product, provided you comply with the GPL.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
Open source doesn't mean, that you can use it however you wish to use it. It means that the source is open. This allows for audits and reading the code, perhaps knowing what the tool / library actually does. What you are allowed to do with it however, is a different matter. If you are looking for something with more ethics and agenda, maybe you are looking for free/libre software.
- fermigier 5y ago
  "It means that the source is open." -> Nope. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition for instance: "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code."
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago

laurent123456 5y ago

The title is quite disingenuous. They make it sound like it's someone personal open source project, when clearly it's a commercial venture ran by multiple people. This title should be changed.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

I work a lot with icons, even submitted some of my own design to materialdesignicons set. These sets look nice. However, that's the only good thing about them. Subscription model is ridiculous for this sort of things, licensing is unclear. So I'll pass on using them.

thepra 5y ago

Really? No font version or single svg file with #ids pointers?

kolla 5y ago

I don't think the author understands what open source is.

wjdp 5y ago

Any way to download the whole set? What keeps me using Font Awesome is the npm packages and ease of integration into frontend frameworks. This set it seems you need to download each icon you want to use, copy into project &c.

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
We did have an NPM package a few months ago but had to deprecate it. You can search and multi-select the icons you need. Here's a quick gif on how to do that: https://twitter.com/streamlinehq/status/1488139311128391683 https://twitter.com/streamlinehq/status/1488139311128391683

qwertox 5y ago

This is nothing but an ad.

vincent-lemoign 5y ago

Anyone know how we can change the title though?

koustubhs 5y ago

How is this Open Source? These are proprietary icons being peddled as open source.

masa331 5y ago

For anybody just looking for nice icons instead of a open-source discussion i can also recommend https://icons8.com https://icons8.com. They are the same freemium model as these

Jasp3r 5y ago

Nice design but how do I use your icons? Do I manually have to download every single SVG? You seem to have a collection feature, which requires some mouse acrobatics and a lot of clicks and patience, but even there it's not possible to export multiple icons to an iconfont whatsoever.

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
You can multi-select and download too or get it via github/figma. https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/webalys-hq/streamline-vectors/blob/main/R... https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 https://www.figma.com/community/file/1063138616574654762 We still recommend using the app just because we keep improving icons frequently.
- Jasp3r 5y ago
  May I ask why you can't download it from your collection page, it would make the most sense to me. Thanks for the links! I didn't even know it was hosted on github as your main site doesn't link to it. I tried the Streamline Icons plugin for figma, but it doesn't work: "Oh no! An error has occurred. The dev team has been notified."
  - vincent-lemoign 5y ago
    Agree, we should add the links on the main site so it's clearer. But, it seems like a step back if you need to use figma file or github to search when you can use our app. The figma plugin works on my end. I've asked the dev team to look into it but in the meantime can you recheck on your end if the error persists?

karmakaze 5y ago

Could be a very interesting collection. What it really needs is an search function or tag name autocomplete. I'm not about to 'browse' through thousands of tags to find relevant ones. Cmd-F helps, but why is that necessary?

vincent-lemoign 5y ago
there is a search function right up at the top. There's global search and individual set search available. Are you not able to find that?