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Suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design (adamwhitcroft.com)
821 points by pajju on Nov 23, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 98 comments


Thank you very much for this. The website is amazing, UX is perfect and the content (the icons) is top-notch. I will someday re-pay you for this wonderful favor you've done to the community of designers like us, especially considering the fact that it's difficult to find good stuff without having to attribute the creator.


Thanks for the kind words! Attribution is optional, but always appreciated :)


Off topic, but you might want to clarify the licence a bit. It's a bit nitpicky, but you did not specify if we can create derivatives (though your intro message about adding photoshop layer styles strongly implies it), and if can sublicence it, etc. You also might want to add some disclaimers that waive any warranty and liability you might have.

Try http://www.tldrlegal.com/ and pick a licence, if you want to, that might help.


Thanks for the link. Here's 5 Gigabyte free ui/icons/psd interface. http://www.bypeople.com/


Warning, just visiting that link loads 30 Megabytes! That is insane. Luckily I did not visit with my quota-limited mobile account.

"Download" requires an e-mail address. Terms say "By downloading this bundle, you agree to receive an email from us, and to be eventually subscribed to our newsletter." Mailinator works. :)

> under this license you may not: (...) allow direct downloads of the materials from any other server that is not ByPeople's. You must redirect users to ByPeople's site.

Lawyer speak probably, but to me that makes using any files in websites hosted by myself impossible.


It's a lot of stuff, including psd's and Photoshop related items. They're only usefull if you re-save (and slice) for web. I think he just doesn't want anyone else hosting these files. The required email? TenminuteMail does the job just fine. 30 mb's? Could be but i don't know why anyone clicking on a link to 5 gig would care about 30 mb ;-)


That's one of the worst excuses for a bloated page I've ever heard. Luckily bit-torrent site operators don't share that view.


It's no excuse as I didn't build the page. I have no idea why it's 30 mb and it would have been very easy for me to share the file otherwise, but the only thing the creator asked for is a link to his (bloated) site which is only fair.


I...I don't even know how this can be offered for free. This is practically a whole marketplace worth of goods. Simply amazing.

Thanks for sharing.


Nice icons indeed, but amazing? How is this more amazing than Linux, apache, node.js, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, python, .... And mane more. All this software is also free... Just take a look at the Debian/red hat/Ubuntu repository, it is practically a whole marketplace worth of free goods...


It does not necessarily have to be more amazing than all the free software you cited to be amazing by itself, but I get your point.

People seem to me more or less used to software given for free (& sometimes even open source) by now, especially on HN. On the other hand, quality graphic work is not yet something this community is used to see free and with such a permissive license.

Anyways, this is still a lot of hard work, given for free, and it is amazing.


@ako: so best would be you go there, and leave your comments there, too ;-)



This is not reddit, and this link is not constructive.


Yes HN is slowly becoming Reddit, and all we can do is flag posts. But they just keep coming!


I'm usually first in line to disagree with the way people bring in The Holy Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but this one is good:

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)


I didn't know account = person. Also, I could have been just a reader.

What's next, I can't make an observation about programming, because my account is not "senior" enough?

I've been here for years, and your logic is broken.


My logic is fine. All I did was quote a guideline. If you think HN is becoming like Reddit in a bad way, then back it up with more than a worthless one-liner.


"created 77 days ago"



It's even free for commercial use, too! Just... wow!


This will probably make me seem ungrateful but to me that bundle seems to be quantity over quality. Don't get me wrong - there's some nice stuff in there but there's also a high proportion of cruft (geocities phoned and want their graphics back).


Both the OP and this...Christmas has indeed come early.


That's amazing marketing


I agree, I think potential customers are going to contact him for customized icons. Win win for him and some of us without the money or creative ability.


It's like a tornado learned how to use Photoshop and just starting slinging Layer Effects everywhere without a reason. The website itself is just as much a mess.


very cool, but to nitpick, the email validation is, like most, wrong. A "+" is perfectly valid in email addresses.


Legend! Thank you so much.


My brain just asploded. Thank you!


:O

I love the Internet.


Adam this is awesome, the fact that you refunded people who had already purchased is even more awesome

http://adamwhitcroft.com/2012/11/on-batch/

Really great work


Totally agree.

It wasn't expected and I don't think anyone would have thought worse of him if he kept the money.

Actions like this restore my faith in humanity.


+1 for this line:

"Actions like this restore my faith in humanity."


It would be awesome if someone made a vector font for these like FontAwesome: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/


csswizardry's [dead] post:

We’re getting on it :D https://github.com/csswizardry/inuit.css/issues/67


Fantastic work. The website is wonderfully crafted, and the icons are awesome. I really needed this. Quick question, where would one place an attribution to this work? I was thinking at the end of the about page in my application(s).


While an attribution would be appreciated, you aren't required to include one.

If you'd like to however, you can put the mention anywhere you'd like.


Perfect, you got it. Again, fantastic work.


Looks great, quick question someone may be able to answer: in the license he says "[free to use in] any personal or commercial work...Do not redistribute or sell", which is fair enough, but does that restrict use in paid-for apps (such as on mobile devices etc)?


I think that means you can use them in commercial applications, but you aren't allowed to sell the icons themselves.


Spot on.


The license terms mean that the icon set cannot be used in open source projects intended for redistribution. Your call, of course, just pointing it out.


It might be better to use a more standard license, maybe Apache or BSD with an extra clause prohibiting "sale in whole apart from use in a larger software distribution." IANAL but it might hold up better and be less confusing.

Otherwise, obviously really great work and very generous. Thanks.


@davidw - that is meant to refer to not selling or redistributing the icon pack as a whole - you are more than welcome to use it in any open source redistributed work.


I think that requirement would conflict with some open source licenses -- they typically grant the right to redistribute and modify the source code in any way.

That would include stripping out everything but the icons and selling them.

So if the license requires all accompanying code/assets to be under similar licenses, that could prevent use of your icons. I think that's the case under the GPL? Not really sure anymore.

e: After doing a bit more reading, I believe I was wrong. As long as the icons aren't somehow compiled into the binary, there are no license problems.



No, this differs from CC-NC in that you can use them in a commercial work, you just can't sell them on their own. Using CC-NC would prevent users from bundling these into a commercial product whatsoever.


In that case...

Public Domain and CCZero would be a very efficient way to quiet people's fears about what they can't do with this icon set, without alarming them that they need Legal Advice to build their app. You've tried to trim down the restrictions to almost nothing, but we have an established protocol to encompass all uses. Why not go all the way?


Bookmarked.

As a developer with 0 design skills stuff like this makes me feel like I can fully complete my work.

I personally appreciate the fact that you did this out of love for your craft and respect for the industry. There are too few of you in this industry my friend.

Thank you


You are most welcome - thank you for the incredibly kind words.


I hope the creator of the icons is not upset by my forwardness, but I've converted these icons to bootstrap style icons for easy use. Visit https://github.com/chrismarlow9/Batch-Bootstrap-Plugin for the project.

It allows you to add the icons with pure CSS style (using rowXcolumn) class name. The CSS file isn't exactly small but I did this for the purposes of people making friendly names for icons and expanding on the project (I tried myself but I hate coming up with semantics for technical things. Anyways, enjoy. I simply used GIMP to Greyscale the image and invert the color to white. Transparent the image on your own (or maybe I will later)...


Thanks.. I came back to this post hoping I found find just this.

I'll get the size down later, but perfect for development.


Good on you for giving your hard work away.

I would make a suggestion though to tighten up those pixels in the demo png, the half pixels are making most icons look blurry http://cl.ly/image/093M0z0z3a2W


Thanks dude. I used tinypng to compress the preview (as it's pretty large) and that can produce mild artifacting.


Whitcroft is also responsible for Climacons (weather icons) which have become standard for many apps. #hatTip

http://adamwhitcroft.com/climacons/


I'd like to thank all of you for such an incredible response to Batch. It has far exceeded anything I could have imagined.

While I was asleep, a complete web font was made, a second is in the works, 2 CSS sprite kits were made and someone sent me a Photoshop CSH file.

I am completely blown away.

I'll spend some time checking these additions thoroughly before adding them to the Batch site.

Thank you all, Adam


Thanks!

Not to be picky about the punctuation or anything, but I would have thought a comma would be good here:

"Each icon is a single Photoshop shape layer, meaning ..."

Alternatively, replace "meaning" with "so"?

Thanks again!


This is an amazing set of icons. I'll make sure I use them and credit you.

Your giving this for free reminds me of the biggest problem Freelance artists/developers have : if one's a dev at heart, it's creating that fuels one's achievements. It's the fact that people are using the results. Problem is : how do I keep creating if I can't make a living out of it ?

And it's a hard one. I read so many headlines on HN which revolve around "launch a startup!", but never really do more than read them because of one single fact : i'm bloody not, and never will be interested by selling anything, be it cakes, code or my secondhand ipad.

I totally suck at marketing cause I totally hate practicing this art (of which i do not doubt the usefulness).

It's taken me 40 years to realize that : 1) i'm not interested in sales/marketing 2) doing it takes me down a path of depression every single time i try and i'm better of doing other things like building my own house (took me 3 years) or working in mechanics (repairing engines) 3) most important : there's no shame in not caring about marketing/sales and (therefore) sucking at it.

I had the opportunity to team with a guy who excels at marketing, and am able to code for a living full time while still living in a small village on a secluded island with a good internet connection. I truly hope you'll meet one of these ! Cause your work is insanely good.


Awesome! Would have paid for them. Donation coming your way!


How do you donate?


If you click the 'Download' button you have 2 options presented:

1 - Download the icons 2 - Donate & download the icons


"If you use Batch in a Dribbble shot, the inclusion of a “Batch” tag would be appreciated so that I can keep a curated bucket."

I'm far, far too old to understand this, any clues?


From Dribbble's About page: Dribbble is show and tell for designers, who share shots — small screenshots of the designs and applications they’re working on.

So, pretty much, he wants people to tag their entries with "Batch" when they use icons from the linked set.



Nice work, but shame they're not in SVG format. Photoshop files are notoriously awkward to read for Open Source software.



I'd like this to be an icon font.


That's in the pipeline - they take a fair amount of time to get right :)


Great! I'm really fond of the idea of icon fonts and I'd like to use some of those icons on a web project of mine that I'm working on. I shall bookmark the link :)


How about a css sprite for bootstrap? A complement to the standard glyphicons would be awesome, and if you goal is to see Batch in many designs as possible, that would probably help (beautiful work btw)


That's a great suggestion - I'll certainly do that. A single 16x16 sprite with an accompanying CSS file would be simple enough to knock up.



I was happily upvoting adam's new account, and then remembered that this is hacker news:

    var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (var i = links.length >>> 0; i--;) {if (links[i].innerHTML==='adamwhitcroft'){var j=i; while (!links[++j].id){}; console.log(links[j], links[j].click())}}
If you paste this into WebKit inspector and run it, it will click all of adam's upvote links.

Here's a little puzzle - there is one trivial change that will change upvotes to downvotes. Can you guess what it is?


Yes, but I would hope it would not be used. This isn't what the point system is about on HN.


In general, no. But when someone is so generous, and I want to add to their karma, why put myself through the misery of finding and clicking on his upvotes? Like any tool, it should be used responsibly.


Very generous. I especially like the mit-ish license. I have this theory that permissive licensing will produce more goodwill and credibility. Hope I'm right!


Looks rather interesting. Does anyone have any experiences using tools like ImageMagick for batch compositing/coloring/modifying PSD layers?


Use GIMP and write your own scripts, it's got a pretty comprehensive scripting environment.


Thanks a ton Adam! Any chance you can upload a set that isn't in Photoshop format (for those of us without Photoshop)?


Many third-party programs can also take PSD's. What are you trying to use?


Great effort, definitely bookmarking this.


Thank you. The Icons are amazing!


I love this, thanks.. but is it only me that wants a set of non cuddly icons for once? I.e. easy on the rounded corners.


Adam - If there was a way to share your address with me then I would be sending you some powerfully hopped IPA's!


Thanks, but no I'm not sharing my address on HN.


Very nice job! I sent you a couple bucks.. it's not much but if I use them for something I'll send more :)


Nice! I'm a developer with zero illustration talent. Even if I never use these, I donated anyway. :)


I could see this replacing my bootstrap icons once this gets a CSS file.


I'd like to see someone provide a free alternative to Glyphicons.


Awesome, thanks for the sure. Looks great.


Thank you very much for this gift!


Thanks Adam. Beautiful icons.


Excellent work. Thank you.


Ha, that's pretty cool.


Thanks for this Adam!


This is amazing!


very nice - thank you for these


thanks this is amazing !




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