7 ms·
Free Flag Icons
- visualidiot 14y agoWow, they're beautiful!
- highace 14y agoHow long did they take to make?
- timparker 14y agoThe flags themselves, around 100hrs! We updated the styling and improvements this week which took a few more hours.
- pilsetnieks 14y agoIt would help tremendously if the files were named by, say, ISO 2-letter country codes (where it applies).
- timparker 14y agoThere are two folders within the zip, one has them named in this way :)
- pilsetnieks 14y agoOh, right, thanks, that's exactly what I was thinking about :)
- dagw 14y agoWow, awesome. I'll definitely be using this. In fact this is so awesome I actually gave my real email address.
- atas 14y agoYou didn't have to give an email address, btw. So no point in giving a fake one anyway. But I think someone willing to bypass "registration" would not impulsively submit a fake address, but rather would have read the small print.
- ilija139 14y agoI have heard about GoSquared, but have never tried it before. I just signed up and I'm truly amazed. The dashboard view is really useful feature. IMO this is as good as it gets for real-time website analytics. Awesome work guys!
- BUGHUNTER 14y agoThanks for the contribution. It would be great to have all flags, especially the small ones, in ONE file to avoid x requests on sites with many flags. Here is one idea: offer a service for people who need multiple country flags on their site to generate the one big flag picture set they need for their specific set of flags - one big country-selector that spits out a big flags.png after submit would be a great promo! Thanks!
- timparker 14y agoThanks! We'll be adding it to github in the next few days with this feature :)
- chucknelson 14y agoIs anyone else surprised that in the age of "retina" displays, these only go up to 64px?
- timparker 14y agoSee "How long did they take to make?" comment below.
- joeblau 14y agoOne of the tags says "vector" so they may be able to produce higher resolution files. That said, I think the @2x should be in there if people want to use these for mobile.
- visualidiot 14y agoThey are @2x up until 32px.
- bustaarama 14y agoThanks! Can't find any informations regarding a license (usage) ?!
- simontabor 14y agoThey're MIT, will be adding the license in a bit
- indiecore 14y agoDon't know if you saw above but they are MIT license and they are going to update the DL files later today.
- timparker 14y agoYep, sorry it was missing from the start. Should be in the .zip now!
- morsch 14y agoUnder what license are they released? There is no licensing information on the page, or on the parent "freebies" page, or in the zip file itself.
- simontabor 14y agoThey're MIT, will be adding the license in a bit
- timparker 14y agoLicence is now in the .zip
- cheeaun 14y agoI think it would be awesome if all these flag icons are hosted on a CDN and we can all link to it.
- pjriot 14y agoThat's a disturbing sense of entitlement. The creators spent 100+ hours on this work and you're asking them to cover the bandwidth costs of hosting it for you?
- adaml_623 14y agoHad to look up this one when I saw it was included: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mars
- uvdiv 14y agoWhat were the criteria for including some disputed states (South Ossetia, Somaliland) while excluding others (Transnistria, Azawad)?
- timparker 14y agoWhen we made them we used this > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sovereign-state_flags http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sovereign-state_flags and a bit of > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_unrecognized_states http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_unrecognized_stat...
- zalew 14y agothe question is why 'a bit', especially when there is only 11 of them.
- timparker 14y agoThe flags were made a while ago when there was less than 11, we will have to add a few more in the coming days.
- rolux 14y agoFor a good list of countries, mostly derived from wikipedia as well, that comes with properties like dependency, disputed, and so on, includes historical data, back to 1970, and whose main purpose, similarly, is a set of flag icons, see OxJS: https://oxjs.org/#doc/Ox.COUNTRIES https://oxjs.org/#doc/Ox.COUNTRIES https://oxjs.org/#examples/countries/live https://oxjs.org/#examples/countries/live (The latter has a menu to show more than just current sovereign countries.) Edited to add: In https://trac.oxjs.org/browser/oxjs/tools/geo https://trac.oxjs.org/browser/oxjs/tools/geo you'll find the python toolchain to automatically generate the flag images.
- neilk 14y agoThanks for making these, but I wish you would have also acknowledged the sources in your LICENSE.txt. As for the license itself -- even though I used to work on licensing and UI for Wikimedia Commons, I acknowledge this can be quite confusing, so I sympathize. I've rewritten this comment a couple of times already. It's not clear to me if you can re-release everything under any single license. It's also unclear to me if you can assert copyright over the whole thing, as you must if you are going to use a CC license or the BSD-style license you used. However, I would suggest that whatever you are doing, you should not arbitrarily reassign the work to a BSD license. They are not designed for graphics, since they require publication of the license wherever the graphic is used. Imagine if you wanted to use the icon on a postcard; according to the license you'd have to include the license text on the postcard. If you want these to be used widely Creative Commons Zero is much better... assuming you can assert copyright for the whole thing as a derivative work. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ The really pedantically correct thing would be to list the licenses for each and every flag, but I acknowledge that would be no fun at all, and as far as I know Wikimedia Commons doesn't have tools to make that easy with large collections. Sorry for the legalese - I think you did a great thing here, I'm just trying to help you share it with others.
- Sembiance 14y agoNo vector format? Don't get me wrong, these flags are appreciated, but to spend all that time making them in a bitmap format? Kinda seems like a bit of a waste, since flags seem PERFECT for vector format.
- timparker 14y agoIf you want vector flags use wikiepedias SVG flags. These are made to be pixel perfect at different sizes, something that wouldn't work if we just batched them all from vectors. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sovereign-state_flags http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sovereign-state_flags
- hp 14y agoUsing flags in your visual design can be tempting but in my experience it's a bad idea. The problem is that certain flags force you to "take sides" in political disputes that you likely aren't aware of and don't understand. You'll inadvertently make one side very angry with you, and you won't even really know what political statement you accidentally made. It's OK if you stick to flags you know but if you start trying to have a list of all flags, there's no way to do that without making various groups angry. I don't doubt that there's a "right" answer to all disputes over flags but do you really know what all the disputes are and want to arbitrate them as part of developing your software ... Deliberately not digging up specific disputes because the whole point is, if you have to ask what they are or if you start debating them case by case, maybe this wasn't a can of worms that needed opening. (also, the last time I encountered this was long enough ago that I'm sure the relevant examples have changed, and I never understood them well to begin with. But it was clear that flags poked more than one political group in the eye.)
- hendi_ 14y agoAnd even worse is using them to indicate languages. There are countries with more than one language (e.g. Belgium which Dutch, French and German) and there are languages which are used in more than one country (think us.png vs gb.png for "English"). So, rule of thumb: - never use flags to indicate a language - use flags to indicate a country only after thinking twice EDIT: Nonetheless, this flag collection looks awesome, and if I ever have a legit use case for flags in a GUI I'll definitely use them. Thanks for sharing under a free license!
- Xion 14y agoHow do you indicate a language in icon-like manner then? Is using the textual ISO codes the only safe option?
- hendi_ 14y agoIt depends. First of all, flags are really bad for languages since there's an n:m relationship. Which flag would you use for "English"? The USA flag? The Flag of England? The Union Jack? If you offer only "English" then depending on if you write "center" or "centre" you may offend either USA or British people. Same for "German", where a Swiss may be offended to see "Straße" while a German could be offended by seeing "Strasse". Of course most people won't care about that and I bet most Brits are used to see "color" without a 'u' on the internet, but from experience I can say that there are people who care about or even get offended by that. But even if using textual representation for languages like "English" is not perfect, offering every language-country possibility (en-US, en-GB, en-??...) isn't a viable route in most cases since there are way to many combinations. Just think of yourself (assuming you're from the USA): would you rather see the word "English" in a language selector or the Flag of England? So what should you do? I'd suggest going with textual representations like "English" or the ISO 639-x shortcodes ("en" or "eng"). Being German that's easy to say for me, and I know a handful of people who'd like me to distinguish between de_DE, de_AT and de_CH. So as I've said: it depends :-)
- rhplus 14y agoA bit of advice: avoid using flags altogether in your user interface unless you really, really need to refer to specific national/political entities. There's far too much room for error or offense, whether you're incorrectly assigning the wrong flag to a geographical region or have not represented the flag correctly. I haven't looked at the flag set, but I'm betting there are errors related to the correctness of layout, aspect ratios and colors and to the clarity of symbols and text. Even more importantly, never use a flag to represent a language choice. (* most major websites do avoid using flags, but one notable exception is Apple, which completely corrupts every single flag with their own shiny style: http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ ...)
- visualidiot 14y agoA bit of advice: actually look at something before judging it. If you'd downloaded, you'd know that they all look correct.
- jenius 14y ago+100 on this comment
- rhplus 14y agoYou're completely missing my point. I'm recommending against using flags at all, correct or otherwise. It's just too much of a sensitive issue for many users. And to your point about correctness: there are specific issues such as illegible text in the Saudi flag and general issues such as the use or gradients or borders throughout.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Strom 14y agoI downloaded it and looked at Estonia's flag. It's all wrong. I don't personally care, it looks close enough, but some people might take issue with this. The ratio is 3:2, but the correct ratio is 11:7. The colors are wrong, both the gradients and flat versions. The correct RGB colors are well defined. [1] [1] Colors and ratio are defined on this page http://valitsus.ee/et/riigikantselei/riigi-ja-omavalitsuste-symbolid/eesti-lipp http://valitsus.ee/et/riigikantselei/riigi-ja-omavalitsuste-...
- ComputerGuru 14y agoThe website flags these as "vector" - they are gorgeous and I'm wondering if the actual SVG versions are available? If you want one particular flag (instead of many for language purposes), I think these are very fine.
- munyukim 14y agoI have been looking for high quality flag icons like these; I would be definitely using them in the future. Thanks!
- crazygringo 14y agoFor people saying "don't use flags", and "especially not for languages"... I totally agree in theory, but... In a lot of interfaces, having something visual helps a lot. Especially when you need to pick something from a list where you don't even know what language the user speaks! Obviously, you can present a text list like "English (American)", "Português (Brasil)", "አማርኛ", "贛語", but it can look kind of ugly, how do you decide to sort them, etc. Plus, a lot of times the language is tied to a country, because each country has their spelling and grammar differences, etc. That's why many times you don't see "Portuguese" in language lists, but rather "Portuguese (Portugal)" and "Portuguese (Brazil)" -- because there's no such thing as a general-purpose Portuguese. So while flags aren't perfect, a lot of the time they help far more than they hurt. In a perfect world, there would actually be language-specific icons that everyone recognized. Suggestions, anybody?
- jarek 14y agoWhat flag do you suggest we use for es_US and fr_CA? Or how to distinguish de_CH and fr_CH?
- shakesbeard 14y agoCommon practice seems to be using a half Swiss/half German flag for de_CH, and half Swiss/half French flag for fr_CH or just the Swiss flag for both languages.
- irunbackwards 14y agoHow is Esperanto classified?
- vacri 14y agoWhy would you not simply use the Esperanto flag? http://flagspot.net/flags/qy-eo.html http://flagspot.net/flags/qy-eo.html
- irunbackwards 14y ago
- halayli 14y agoThese guys have bluntly copied woopra.com
- timparker 14y agoI'd love to know how so?
- visualidiot 14y agoYou're right. It was a Friday evening, we got our blunts out, played some Afroman, and said "hey, we're going to stop doing exactly what we've been doing since 2006 and we're going to bluntly copied woopra.com". It's a shame we had to be exposed like this.
- sailfast 14y agoAs someone that often designs things that are country / geographically specific this is a great collection. I also like it as an idea to drive traffic to your site. You're on my radar now and the other freebies look pretty slick too. Thanks! Definitely made the right impression.
- jblz 14y agoHere's another set that goes up to 128px: http://icondrawer.com/flag-icons.php http://icondrawer.com/flag-icons.php They're free, but require attribution unless you buy a 'royalty-free license.'
- Zenst 14y agoI find selecting country via flags of a global map to not only be alot quicker than a drop down list, but also more intuative. As somebody who lives in Britian/United Kingdom, then selecting via a flag or mini world map is much easier. Reason being from my point of view is often there is no UK/British option and your slotted in as American English in some forms of language selection. Now if the application ror website wish's to do that behind the scene then fine, but with lists you tend not to have that mapping and on flags or a global map your none the wiser. Also educational value and easier upon all cultures that way, some might prefer there drop down lists on the right, some on the left so this avoids that. All in all it offers more positives as apposed to negatives over dropdown lists for country/flag selection. So the option to have icons you can freely use without accidently stepping upoon somebodies IP can only be a good thing and counter any arguments about flag copyrights and images. Amazing how even the simplest common items can be copyrighted - swiss clock being one even Apple slipped up upon. So some free ones are always good.
- timparker 14y agoChange log + details added as a .txt in the .zip
- rolux 14y agoJust to let you know that the current .zip doesn't include the change log, just the license. (Caching issue at gosquared?)