Because of their small size, icons used in UI’s (user interfaces) should be kept fairly simple.

This is especially true for user interfaces for mobile apps and devices like the iPhone, iPad and mobile devices using the Google Android OS. Since the resolution and screen sizes on these devices are small, monochromatic icons and symbols work very well.

I’ve gathered together 15 simple, single-color icon sets that could be used for UI design.

These icon sets are free for commercial use unless otherwise stated. However, be sure to check the licenses for each set before using on any projects.

Wireframe Icons

The folks at Gentleface have released the free Wireframe icon set–a collection of 244 icons that are free for non-commercial use.

Icons are available in 16×16, 32×32 and 48×48 pixel sizes. The icons come in PNG format.

Munich (PC.DE)

The Munich icon set is a selection of 60 simple single-color icons that would be great for a user interface.

The set includes icons in 2 sizes 16×16 and 32×32.

Gesturecons

Gesturecons is a unique icon set featuring hands performing 35 various multi-touch actions.

This set would be useful for those creating iPhone and Google Android apps. The icons are in vector format, so they could be resized easily and used in tutorials and help guides for multi-touch devices.

Available in vector formats (PDF, EPS, AI).

Iconic

Iconic is a simple icon set of 114 icons that’s very easy to see even at small sizes.

Icons are available in 14 colors, 5 sizes (8×8, 12×12, 16×16, 24×24 & 32×32 pixels) and in PNG, SVG, SWC and OmiGraffle formats.

Brightmix Icon Set

Brightmix has released their icon set for free for use on your projects.

The set includes 104 icons in vector (EPS) format.

Token

Token is a very nice set of 128 icons created by brsev.

Icons are available in light and dark versions, as well as 16×16, 32×32, 128×128, 256×256 pixel sizes. Icon formats PNG, ICO (Win).

Token is free for non-commercial use, though an option is available to purchase a royalty-free license for commercial projects.

Axialis

Axialis has several single-color icon sets in various sizes and colors that would be great for use in mobile app user interfaces.

Android Icon Set

Great for Android developers, the 30 letter pressed icons that make up the Android Icons set come in PNG format.

They also include the source file (EPS) for customizing.

Creative Nerds Letter Pressed Icons

100+ letter pressed icons available in PSD format.

108 Mono Icons

Tutorial9 has released an nice set of 108 monochromatic icons.

Icons are 32×32 pixel PNG.

Glyphish (iPhone and iPad UI Icons)

Glyphish is a simple set of 130 UI icons that is designed to work for work great for iPhone and iPad apps in toolbars and tab bars.

Set comes in PNG, PSD and AI formats.

iPhone Toolbar Icon Set (PixelPressIcons)

Free icon set for iPhone toolbars. Contains 50+ 30×30 pixel PNGs.

Guifx v2 Transports Font (Dingbat)

Technically, this isn’t an icon set, but rather a font with dingbat symbols. However, this contains many useful audio/video control symbols and icons.

Deziner Folio UI Icon Set

Deziner Folio has released a free 30-icon vector icon set.

The set in available in PSD.

iPhone UI Icon Set ($69 USD)

The iPhone UI Icon Set contains 160 PNG icons for use in any iPhone app. Optimized in 2 sizes for the toolbar and tab bar.

This is a high-quality icon set and $69 is not a hefty price if you’re using it for a commercial project.

Licenses

As always, check the licenses and terms of service for each icon set before using it.

Photo credit: Business Woman Pressing a Touchscreen Button by Olly via Shutterstock.

If they keep making music long enough, every music icon will eventually release a “Greatest Hits” or “Best of” album. These albums cover some of their best songs.

In a similar vein, this week’s post is a bite-sized recap of some of the best icon-related posts (get it?) that may have slipped by you since they were 1st released.

Let’s rock!

12+ Mega Icon Sets

This is actually one of the very 1st posts published on the site. It showcases over 12 huge (in number) icon sets.

Free Icon Search Tools

Need to find a few icons for your project? Take a look at my review of some of the best icon search engine sites.

10 More Free Icon Sets

10 icon sets from DryIcons. These sets are very useful, unique and free.

Grab Free Web Design Icon Sets

While this post was targeted primarily at web designers, all the font resources listed are great places for graphic designers to find icons for use in their projects as well.

Free OpenX Admin Icon Set V2

Are you using OpenX for serving adverts on your site or blog? It’s a great system, but the backend is pretty rough looking.

That’s why I created a new set of icons (from Fugue) to “reskin” OpenX’s admin section. Think, an OpenX theme pack.

That’s Not All Folks

Expect more icon-related posts to keep on rockin on in the future here at the Es Developed Blog.

In the meantime, you should follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the feed for updates every Monday and Friday.

Photo credits: Man Playing Electric Guitar by Regien Paassen | Time Exposure at a Concert by dwphotos | Crowd Raising Hands at a Pop Concert by G Light | Stock photos from Shutterstock.

Fugue is a free icon set created by Yusuke Kamiyamane–free for personal and commercial projects.

Let’s look at Fugue and how you can quickly add icons from the set to your site via the Fugue CSS Sprite Framework.

Fugue – A Huge Icon Set

This icon set currently has over 2000 16×16 pixel icons (in PNG format and PSD) and more are constantly being added. With this many icons, there’s usually at least 1 or 2 suitable icons for whatever you’re wanting to represent. Each icon is available with or without a shadow.

This set would be great for any web app–it contains many interface and UI icons among others. For example, I used Fugue for my OpenX Admin Icon Set v2.0.

Customize Fugue Icons With the Devkit

Yusuke has also graciously included Photoshop files (PSD’s) for every icon in the set; letting you tweak and combine icons if what’s there is not exactly what you want.

License

Fugue is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

If you prefer not to provide attribution (or can’t), you can also buy a royalty-free license for $49.

Fugue Sprite CSS Framework

If you’re planning on using several icons from Fugue on your website, you might consider using Fugue Sprite CSS from Alison at AlisoTheGeek.com.

The Fugue Sprite CSS framework works on the same principle as any other CSS sprite technique–only easier and faster. Way easier, because you don’t have to do anything by hand.

How To Use It

To use it, just place the single sprite image in the same directory as the Sprite CSS file. To display an icon, use the icon key that’s provided, find the name of the icon, and use that name as the class for your styled element.

Example: You want to display the leaf icon. Find the leaf icon in the list of icons in the key and copy the name of it (fugue-leaf). Include it in your CSS by adding a ‘.‘ in front of the icon name (.fugue-leaf). Fugue Sprite CSS takes care of the rest.

Considerations

Since the sprite framework contains all the icons from the Fugue set, the framework’s a bit large (684 KB total). But if you’re planning on using quite a few icons from the Fugue set, it’d be worth it.

Give Fugue a Try

Give Fugue a try if you haven’t.

If you’ve downloaded it in the past, chances are there are tons more icons added since.

And if you like the set, consider buying the royalty-free license.

I’m considering creating a new icon set and I’m looking into a few ideas as far as the type of icon set.

Here is where I need your help:

What type of icons would you like to see created?

• Transportation icons
  Cars, trucks, vans, boats, trains, etc
• Clothing icons
  Icons for e-commerce sites (tshirts, hoodies, dresses, pants, shoes, coats, etc)
• Money / Financial icons
  Currency symbols, cash, coins, stock market, banking, etc
• Construction / DIY icons
  Drills, saws, hammers, levels, tape measures, etc
• Other
  Tell us what type of icon set you’d like to have

Give Us Your Opinion–Take Our Survey

I will leave this survey open for the next 2 weeks. I look forward to getting your opinions. After the 2 weeks, I’ll share the results.

Share this post with others and let’s get the ideas rolling in!

OpenX 2.8–the newest stable release of the open source ad server has just been released. If you haven’t heard of OpenX before, check out the OpenX site to learn more.

With the new version of OpenX, I’m releasing an update to our free icon set (version 2.0) for the OpenX 2.8 admin.

221 Reworked Admin Icons

The release of OpenX 2.8, which brings a lot of performance, functionality and visual changes also includes a lot of new icons and images in the admin section.

Since I was going to add new icons to the set anyway to make it compatible with OpenX 2.8, I decided to rework the entire set. This version moves away from the Silk-based icons used in v1.0 to icons based on the Fugue icon set.

That ended up being 221 newly reworked icons for this set.

What Does This Icon Set Do?

The EsDev OpenX Admin Icon Set (EDOA) is a drop-in replacement for about 98% the images and icons used in the default OpenX 2.8 admin section.

It basically helps the admin section look more professional, and the icons match the rest of the user interface better than do the default icons.

Who Is This Icon Set For?

The EDOA icon set is for anyone running a self-hosted (as opposed to the hosted version on OpenX.org) version of OpenX; version 2.8 and above.

How Do I Use This Icon Set?

To install the new admin icons:

1. Make a backup of your OpenX images folder (and sub folders) located at: [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/
2. Extract the EsDev-OpenX-Admin-Pro-Icons-v2.0 ZIP to your harddrive
3. Copy the images folder (and sub folders) to [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/ — thus replacing the entire images directory (and sub directories)
4. Clear your browser cache and log into the OpenX admin to see the new icons in use

License and Use

EsDev OpenX Admin Icon Set v2.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike license.

Based on a work at OpenX.org and the Fugue Icon Set, Silk, Tango and the Crystal Project icon sets.

Linking Info

All we ask is that you don’t redistribute the zip file on any other site, but rather link to this post.

When providing a link, do not link directly to the icon set–instead, link to this post:
http://esdev.net/free-openx-admin-icon-set-v20/

Show Your Appreciation

If you use this icon set and enjoy it, show your appreciation by giving a small donation. Any amount is appreciated.

I want to thank John Linden, CTO of OpenX for giving me a heads up about the upcoming release of OpenX 2.8 and the encouragment to update the icon set.

IconPot

IconPot showcases free icon sets for web designers that are not only free for personal and commercial use, but do not require attribution (credit). We featured this site a couple weeks ago and there have been more free icon sets added since then.

IconDock

This is a newly opened icon site. Usually on a project, you only use a handful of icons—not an entire set. At IconDock, you can either purchase the whole set or  just the icons you want from icon sets, which is great for web designers.

Besides their paid icon sets, IconDock also has a post featuring a huge collection of free icons and free icon collections (which we’re happy to have been featured in).

SEM Labs

David of SEM Labs let me know about 2 free icon sets he just released on his site.

Weblog Icon Pack

Several 48 x 48 icons especially suitable for weblogs.

Free Web Design Icon Set

A set of 133 16 x16 pixel icons that are useful for just about any project.

OpenX Admin Icon Set

OpenX is an open source ad management system that comes in hosted or self-hosted versions (similar to WordPress). The self-hosted version of OpenX allows you to change the icons in the administration backend (which look pretty nasty if you ask me).

We released new icons (from the Silk icon set)  for OpenX a few months ago when we first opened this blog, but a plug now and again never hurts.

Even More Icon Sets

For even more free icon sets that we’ve featured here at the Blog, take a look at some our posts in the Icons tag.

Licenses

As always, even when using free icon sets, always check the license, terms of use and linking policies before using them in designs.

I’ve already posted about some great icon sets for designers, but I wanted to share a site I came across from a Twitter post.

IconPot

IconPot has an insane collection of high-quality icons (2880 icons and counting) that are free for personal and commercial use, and don’t require credits or back-links to the author. In fact, those are the requirement for being featured on IconPot.

IconPot adds new icon sets pretty regularly and you can subscribe to their RSS feed or Twitter to keep up-to-date when new sets are added.

Even though this blog is relatively new, there have been many great web and graphic design-related posts in the last few months of 2008. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at just a few (21, actually) of the topics we’ve covered.

Tutorials

• DIY Online Incremental Backups
• BlogDesk Part 1: Publishing Posts to WordPress
• BlogDesk Part 2: Posting to ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine

I’ve written several posts about ExpressionEngine. Here are a few of the most popular.

• Javascript Templates in EE: Speeding Up Page Loads
• Easier Editing in ExpressionEngine and WordPress
• Learn ExpressionEngine in 2 Days

WordPress

Within minutes of WordPress 2.7 being released on WordPress.org, there was the WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Checklist. This contains tips on upgrading your site, including making sure your plugins and themes are compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Online Tools and Services

We’ve reviewed and highlighted several online services and websites that make your job as a web or graphic designer much easier.

• Automatic, Painless Backups With Mozy
• Free Icon Search Tools
• 4 Royalty-Free Photo Search Engines
• 5 Free Online Photoshop Alternatives
• Free Online Billing and Invoicing—Curdbee
• Manage Multiple Email Accounts With Zenbe

Web Design Code

• Don’t Remove Visual Cues For Links
• Quick and Dirty: CSS Shorthand Tips
• Quick and Dirty: Lightning Fast Page Setup
• Quick and Dirty: Optimizing PHP (For Fun and Profit)

Graphic-Related Posts

• 12 + Mega Icon Sets For Designers
• OpenX Admin Icon Set
• 10 More Free Icon Sets
• Inspiration: Retro Clothing Labels

More to Come in 2009

These are just a few of the great posts that have been featured here on the blog and there’s more to come in 2009.

This blog is updated 2 times a week—on Mondays and Fridays/Saturdays. The Monday posts deal with web design-related topics and things of interest to web designers. The posts at the end of the week usually deal with graphic design topics.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS feed so you won’t miss a single post.

Earlier I wrote a post showcasing over 12 mega icon sets for designers. Most of those icon sets had over 100 icons per set.

Now I want to touch on 10 other icon sets from DryIcons — one of the sites featured in the previous post. These sets may not have as many icons in them as the others, but they are very useful and unique.

The icon sets below come in 3 formats for Windows, Linux and Macs: ICO, PNG and ICN.

Ruby Extended Icon Set

The Ruby Extended icon set probably should have been included in the earlier post, but I honestly missed it the first time around. The set includes 238 red and white, beautifully polished icons. There is also another multimedia extension set of 13 icons in the same style.

The icons include: hardware, databases, media controls, e-commerce, graphs and more. This is a fantastic icon set if you’re working with a specific color scheme.

Coquette

Coquette is a fun icon set with rounded curves and bright, bold colors. It includes 50 icons — symbols, email, chat and other icons that would be good for general site or blog design.

Coquette Part 2

Coquette Part 2 contains 50 more icons in the same style as the original Coquette set. This set is geared more toward e-commerce icons, with icons for shopping carts, user actions, monetary symbols and more.

Balloonica

If you’re looking for a unique icon set, Balloonica is for you. The monochrome 80 icon set includes e-commerce and various symbols inside speech balloons.

Grunge Icons

If you want some icons that are grungy, rough and dented-in, here are 3 icon sets for you: Distortion, Grungy Asphalt and Olive Grungy.

Distortion icons look like what might happen if you drop-kicked your iPhone a few times, with 68 red rounded corners, but all beaten, bruised and chipped.

Grungy Asphalt and Olive Grungy icon sets feature 56 round icons.

Sticker Icons

If you’re a sucker for stickers, you’ll love the following 2 icon sets.

Social Icons

If the last sets were a bit rough for your tastes, the Socialize set will brighten your day. They include icons for StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, Furl, YouTube, Yahoo! and RSS.

Stickers

These Stickers icons remind me of the fat, puffy stickers that you just want to poke. The only thing missing is the googly eyes that move when you shake them. The set includes basic internet and monetary symbols in black and white.

License

All the DryIcon icon sets listed above are released under 3 different licenses: free, commercial and extended use. Please read the differences in licenses on their site before using them in any of your projects.

I wrote a previous post of some great free icon sets for web and graphic designers. But sometimes you’re just needing one or 2 icons to spiffy up your design and you’re looking for something specific. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a collection of icons and icon sets, but no good way to search them.

There are a couple icon search engines out there that can help you in your search.

IconFinder

IconFinder has been around for a while and has a large array of icon sets that it searches through. You can search icons by keyword, icon size, or use a tag cloud to find icons.

You can also view the license information and other details of individual icons right from the search results window, without having to go to another page.

With IconFinder, you can also test how the icon will look on a dark background by toggling the background color. This is helpful for checking contrast and alpha transparencies before downloading.

IconFinder’s icon search also can be added to Firefox’s search bar, allowing you to search the IconFinder site without going to their site first.

ICONlook.com

ICONlook.com is a newer icon search engine than IconFinder, but very promising in that it has pretty much all the features IconFinder has.

By default, your search will include all sizes from 12×12 to 128×128 but, like IconFinder, you can filter out the results to find icons of a certain size. I find ICONlook’s way of displaying the sizes easier to use because all the sizes are on display right under the search box (IconFinder’s you have to click a small text link to choose).

With ICONlook you can view the license info, but you have to click the icon and go to another page to see it, which makes it a little less convenient.

When clicking on an icon of a certain size, the page that contains the details about the icon also displays the icon in all of its available sizes-and each icon is labeled so you know its size. This is a very handy feature that I wish IconFinder had.

ICONlook.com doesn’t have a search that can be added to your search bar, but this may not really be too big of a deal to you.

Both search engines have a nice selection of icons that are indexed, but ICONlook has a much bigger selection of icons to search from.

Where do you look for icons?

I admit it, I have an unhealthy addiction to icons. I collect them like they’re going out of style, and when I find a new set, I almost immediately download it with gleeful anticipation.

Hello, my name is Shawn and I’m an iconoholic.

But addictions aside, having a great arsenal of icons at your beck and call can be a lifesaver for web and graphics projects.

Thankfully, there are several excellent free icons sets available. Here are some of my favorites—in no particular order.

Note: This is by no means a complete list of the free icons out there. This is merely a list of some of the icon sets that have a wide range of icons that would be useful to most web and graphic designers.

Fugue

Everyone probably already knows about Silk from FamFam, since you can find them nearly everywhere. However, if you’re looking for the same type of 16 x 16 pixel goodness, it’s worth looking at Fugue from pinvoke.

Fugue’s latest update brings the number of icons up to 971 16 x 16 pixel icons in PNG format. The look of these icons will go with most any type of design.

Also, from pinvoke is Diagona, which is tailored a bit more toward the UI side of icons (with arrows, checks, bullets, etc), has 400 icons (200 10 x 10 pixel icons + 200 16 x 16 pixel icons).

License

Both Fugue and Diagona are free for personal and commercial use under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Tango

One of my favorite things visually about Linux is Gnome and its Tango icon theme. You’ve probably seen icons from this set used in many places—even if you didn’t realize it was from Linux.

This is a huge collection of icons (hundreds?) for the Linux OS, including icons for applications, actions, devices, symbols, emotes, mime types and more. Icons come in vector format (SVG) and PNG format in sizes from 16 to 32 pixels.

The really impressive part of the Tango project is that many people are contributing to it so there are even more icons available on Tango’s site and other places that match Tango’s visual style.

License

Tango is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Oxygen

Like Tango, Oxygen is linked to Linux. It’s an icon set/theme that works with the KDE desktop.

Oxygen is a ginormous icon set, containing well over 1,000 PNG icons in sizes from 16 pixels to 128 pixels (that’s over 1,000 in 16 pixels, 1,000 in 22 pixels, etc), plus vector versions (SVG).

License

Oxygen is released under both a Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and a GNU Library General Public License. You can choose which license you want go use it under.

Classy Icons

Classy Icons from DryIcons is a nicely designed 300 icon set. The set includes icons dealing with databases, online shopping, charts, media devices and more.

Icons are available in PNG, ICO and ICN in sizes from 16 pixels, to 128 pixels. You can download all the icons as a ZIP or browse and download each icon individually if you only need a few.

License

Classy Icons is available through both a free and a commercial license. You can read more details about the differences on their site.

Aesthetica 2

The Aesthetica 2 icon set (also from DryIcons) is a diverse set with a bright, simple design. Like Classy Icons, the set also includes other icons for some oft missed subjects such as databases, media playback buttons, shopping carts and charts.

Aesthetica 2 comes in 181 icons in PNG, ICO and ICN formats. Sizes are available in 16 pixels up to 128 pixels. You can download the icons as a ZIP or browse and download each icon individually if you only need a few.

DryIcons also offers some other nice free icon sets in their Free Icons section, but that could be a whole other post.

License

Aesthetica 2 is available through both a free and a commercial license. You can read more details about the differences on their site.

Bright!

Another great-looking icon set is Bright! from Min Tran.

Bright! contains 148 beautiful icons in vector (EPS) format. This set is well suited for web applications, multimedia and software, with icons for buttons, video, email and even some nice guitars.

License

Bright! is released free for personal and commercial use under a license from IconEden. View the license at IconEden’s website.

Milky

Originally released in 9 installments, Milky (also from the makers of Bright!) is a nice icon set for those who are looking for a more relaxed look. With its rounded corners and green color scheme, Milky is great for blog designs.

Milky comes in over 130 PNG and vector formats (EPS and SVG), in both 48 and 64 pixels sizes.

License

Milky is free for personal and commercial use under a license from IconEden.

Function

Function is a crisp, clean, vibrant icon set, sporting 128 icons. This is a diverse and extremely useful set of icons slanted slightly toward blogs. There are social network icons for Stumble Upon, Digg, and other website icons such as Design Float and Flickr.

License

Function is completely free for whatever you want to use the icons for.

Fresh (Financial)

Yet another icon set from the makers of Bright! comes Fresh Financial Add-On icons. This is a small selection of icons (but still 56) from the full (non-free) Fresh icon set.

The icon set contains 56 financial icons in PNG, TIFF, ICN and ICO formats and in sizes ranging from 16 to 256 pixels.

License

As Bright!, Fresh Financial is free for personal and commercial use under a license from IconEden.

Danish Royalty Free (DRF)

Danish Royalty Free is a brilliant set of icons with a Mac OS feel to it. There are 96 icons (32 x 32 in both PNG and TIFF formats) included in the set.

Finding the link to the correct set is a bit tricky on the site, but look at the slider at the bottom and it’s the one with the keyboard icon.

License

While most of the icons on the site are only for personal use, according to the readme included with the set, this set is free for personal and commercial usage.

DelliPack 1 & DelliPack 2

DelliPack 1 and its big brother DelliPack 2 are both very crisp, clean, rich icon sets released through Smashing Magazine.

While DelliPack 1 only contains 5 icons in PNG format, DelliPack 2 contains 15, more useful icons. Both sets contains icons in sizes from 16 pixels all the way up to 256 pixels.

License

Both DelliPack sets are free for commercial and private use. See the site for more details.

More You Say?

How many did I miss? A bunch. Have any links to other must-have icon sets? Add a comment and share the icon love with us.

OpenX (formerly OpenAds) is a powerful open source ad publishing system that you can install and run on your website. With OpenX, you can serve all kinds of advertisements on your site: Google, Yahoo! Microsoft Ads, etc—even your own in-house ads.

UPDATE: A new version of the OpenX Admin Icon Set (v2.0) has been released. Please use this updated version instead if you’re running OpenX 2.8 and up.

The OpenX administration in the latest version (2.6.1 2.6) is pretty nicely laid out—all except the icons. Being a graphic designer, the icons detract slightly from the look and feel of the admin section for me and look like they’ve been cobbled on from previous versions.

For one of my projects, I decided to go through and replace some of the OpenX admin icons with icons from the, by now, practically standard Silk icon set. I liked how it turned out, so I decided to release the results for download.

OpenX Admin Icon Set v1.0

Installation

To install new admin icons:

1. Make a backup of the images folder (and sub folders) located at: [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/
2. Copy the contents of OpenX Admin Icon Set v1.0 zip to [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/ — thus replacing the images folder (and subfolders)

Optional: You can replace the OpenX logo that appears at the top left of the admin section with your own logo by replacing the image named logo-wtag.png inside the images/ directory. The dimensions should be 170×56.

License

OpenX Admin Icon Set v1.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Based on work at OpenX.org and the Silk icon set.

As far as attribution goes, if you use the icon set you don’t have to put a link on your site, but an email of thanks or a comment would be appreciated.

Note: If you want to share this, please do not link to the file directly—link to this post. Do not place this file on another site for direct download.