

Free icons for any object in the world - tansey
http://thenounproject.com

======
MatthewPhillips
These CC Attribution licenses always scare me off. First off, what the heck
does this even mean?

    
    
        You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author
    

The author almost never specifies _how_ they want to be attributed. But since
they're using an Attribution license they must want to be attributed some how.

So how am I going to attribute an author if I'm using their icons in a mobile
app? That seems like quite a bit of extra work.

I don't want to sound unappreciative, this is an awesome project, but I need a
"how to use CC attribution art for dummies".

~~~
wisty
It's up to the author to specify. For most wikipedia text, you need to link
back to the original article _or_ a copy of the article _or_ include a list of
the major authors.

On the other hand, StackExchange is more onerous - they require a link to SX,
a link to each author, each author's name, links to each author's profile, and
a text blurb indicating that the content is from SO. Oh, and no "nofollow"
links, or JS tricks - they want the google juice.

You also need to ensure that derivative work is also CC, if there is a -SA
clause (which I think is the case for both wikipedia and SX.

It should all be there in the TOS page.

If they author/site doesn't say, just link back to them, and include a short
blurb (i.e. "by <username> at <website>". Really, that's likely to be all they
want. If they cared about the legalities, they probably include them in the
TOS. Or email them, asking for clarification.

~~~
a3_nm
For Wikipedia, apparently someone did their homework: the disclaimer under the
edit box says "You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution
under the Creative Commons license."

SO's insistence on non-obfuscated links doesn't make much sense to me, though.
Users retain copyright to the content they submit to SO, so it's them, not SO,
who say which attribution they would like. SO could require some sort of
attribution to be sufficient (like Wikipedia does), but users are free to say
that they accept any sort of attribution besides that, even one which does not
credit SO at all.

------
iamwil
Actually, what I really need is a VerbProject. What's the universal symbol for
"Invite your friends"? How about "Like"? Web apps are more full of verbs than
there are nouns, but we use icons of objects as substitute for verbs. like an
envelope for "send mail" and a floppy disk for "save"

------
arkitaip
This could be incredibly useful when designing highly international
sites/apps. Hopefully it will be indexed by the already awesome icon finder

EDIT: Icon finder delivers
<http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:nounproject>
<http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:nounproject_nps>
[http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:nounproject_cook...](http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:nounproject_cook_and_shanosky)

~~~
wxs
I wish I knew about iconfinder before. Very handy, thanks.

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tedkimble
I've been using a few of them lately; they're great. However, I wish they
would expand their wonderful noun project to include verbs and adjectives and
more. (Yes, it looks like they take the noun part rather serious.)

Sure, there are nouns/icons like running
(<http://thenounproject.com/noun/running/>), but I've had to abandon a number
of searches on their site after realizing I'm not searching for a noun!

------
danparsonson
Small suggestion - don't start searching until the user has stopped typing for
a short period (or if you're doing that already, increase the time-out). If
I'm typing 'house', I don't need search results for 'h', 'ho', 'hou', etc.,
and since the site is running slow at the moment, it seems to get a bit
confused when multiple result sets come back.

------
Jach
Unfortunately this doesn't help me decide what a "FtrsIndexScanRel" icon
should look like. :( I like these, though I'm a bigger fan of the famfamfam
icons.

~~~
wlievens
I find the _fugue_ icons more diverse and even cutier than famfamfam's silk
icons.

------
westiseast
I used these before on a travel site - fantastic. Some of the icons are a bit
too over-worked (ie. they don't work well small, and they're a little too
detailed) but overall, a huge set of icons really well designed. Only issue I
had with the site (a while back) was couldn't find a big ZIP download of all
icons, or PNG files. Had to go to some other big creepy download site for
that. Weird.

~~~
tedkimble
You're right. They look beautiful at >100px on a typical display, but many
look quite cramped if you try to match their dimensions to the height of your
standard paragraph font.

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bprater
I just tried to embed one of these on a test site. It's really not that
useful. The HTML code ends up taking up half a screen.

I'd prefer these icons dumped into a custom font file. Then it takes up
literally one character in HTML and can be completely modified using CSS.

~~~
josephcooney
really? Because fonts on the web are so much easier to deal with than PNG
files?

~~~
jenius
They come in svg format, which work on most modern browsers as well

~~~
josephcooney
Yes, but PNGs will be easier to deal with than SVG and webfonts. I guess SVG
give you the flexibility of turning them into high-fidelity versions of
whatever you want. I regularly use nounproject SVGs to create 'icons' in
Microsoft's vector XAML format.

------
JacobIrwin
Sweet UI. Useful and directional app for sure.

Wanted to give you a heads^ that there was some lagging during homepage load
and during icon (file) zip: 'noun_project_705.svg' downloading. I'm on MacBook
Pro OS X Version 10.6.8 using Chrome (and the apps I am controlling in other
Chrome tabs are cruising). Maybe there's some versioning-optimization fixes
you could look into - or maybe it's me. I'm running at full wiFi connectivity
(and AirPort bars) at the Sandbox Suites near Union. So I thought I'd at least
drop you my observation as to see if I could help. Overall though - sleek
work, I find comfort when controlling your app.

------
gills
An impressive suite of icons in a nice minimalist format. But...I guess
looking at a large number of these, linguistic expressions seem to be less
complex per concept than the iconographic equivalents.

------
machinespit
The Easter Eggs are pretty neat (if you can find them). Here's one:
<http://thenounproject.com/noun/swing/> (Mouse over the thumbnail)

------
jamesrcole
Perhaps you could allow feedback on icons? A number of them don't conjure for
me the thing they're supposed to. For example, 'mummy' is definitely not what
comes to mind when I see the 'mummy' icon. The icon doesn't really look like
anything in particular to me; I find it just gives of a slightly weird vibe.
Or the 'golf' icon - the club looks more like a hockey stick to me.

------
hng
This reminds me of the Isotype project (1924-1934). If it isn't an inspiration
it is an nice coincidence.

* Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotype_(picture_language)>

* Isotype gallery: <http://www.gerdarntz.org/isotype>

~~~
james2vegas
Yeah, I love how, for example, <http://thenounproject.com/noun/bread/> is
basically a vectorisation of <http://www.gerdarntz.org/node/255> without
acknowledgment.

~~~
a3_nm
It's probably a coincidence, I'd say. There are only that many ways to
represent a piece of bread.

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MortenK
I'm on a laptop with Internet explorer 8 and is getting the message that
"Internet explorer does not support the NounProject", and later down on the
page "Currently, Internet explorer is the only browser that cannot display the
format that is best suited for this site".

Does anyone with access to the site, know what this technology / format is,
that IE 8 doesn't support?

~~~
justinlatimer
The icons are all rendered as vectors using SVG which IE < 9 doesn't
understand.

~~~
reven
Is this not polyfillable with some add-on? I am sure I read that somewhere.

~~~
andrewcooke
<http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/> is a nice project that implements svg in
flash when necessary. it would probably work here.

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robert-boehnke
Is there a torrent of these icons, maintaing the metadata?

I don't really want to tax their servers at the moment.

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evilswan
The site is REALLY slow right now.

Have you tried viewing the html - there's some neat ASCII art at the top.

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martinshen
Isn't this kind of old. It was a kickstarter project several months ago. I
thought it was shared here

~~~
petercooper
Yes. It has been on HN several times and it is about 8 months old:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981370> (239 days ago)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986921>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2003817>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629937>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712978>

Dupes are very common on HN nowadays, despite some people claiming they're not
:-)

------
Cyph0n
I don't really see the point to this. On the plus side, the design is awesome,
especially the 404 page:

<http://blog.thenounproject.com/>

~~~
jackolas
Thats the standard Tumblr 404 page.

~~~
Cyph0n
No wonder it's familiar...

------
robtoo
No search facility? Really?

Yes, I know you can URL-hack, but a search-engine with stemming would make the
site a lot more usable/useful.

~~~
smiler
The search is on the front page. Where it says search, click it. It's not
immediately obvious though

~~~
robtoo
Thanks.

It was interesting to see how strong my expectations are for what a search box
looks like that I will simply not see something right in front of me if it
breaks the established conventions.

Also: putting it on the front page only doesn't help.

------
yummyfajitas
Just curious, does this site have a public API? The kickstarter project
suggests there is one, but I can't find it on the site.

~~~
dglassan
I was looking for one too...couldn't find one.

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fuzzythinker
Was hoping verbs would be their next project. Sadly theverbproject.com is just
someone's blog/portfolio page.

------
Lambent_Cactus
Is there a way to filter to show only the Public Domain icons without opening
each shadow box individually?

------
pbreit
Crazy slow loading web site and doesn't work right on an iPad. But a nice
idea.

~~~
andrewflnr
Worked fine for me, once it loaded. Did you scroll with two fingers?

~~~
pbreit
Just tried again. It's brutally slow. I have never scrolled with two fingers
before but that worked.

------
maxogden
also see the related <http://iconathon.org> initiative which is a series of
icon brainstorming hackathons in a bunch of cities

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pavel_lishin
I'll say it. There's no icon for "penis".

------
streptomycin
Like Neal Stephenson's mediaglyphs.

------
zbowling
been using non-project for a while. One of my favorite sites for basic
objects.

------
enterneo
I don't find social icons :-(

~~~
cynusx
you might want to look at designmoo.com and <http://365psd.com/>

Both these sites provide free social icons regularly.

------
Kwpolska
Reverse the triangles in #680 and I would be happy. (hint: triforce.) I was
unable to find A BLOODY KEYBOARD.

Also, your polish locale sucks. Use UTF-8 and ask the BROWSER, not determine
my LOCALE by IP.

Additionally, you shalln't use ` /' in HTML5.

