We know how important web icons can be to a web page. They look more interesting than text and are more likely to attract the eye than the words. For instance when you use lists to show a product’s feature it’s recommended to use web icons as people are often bored to read full descriptions and putting icons next to features’ description will definitely make the list easier to process.
The problem is, lists are boring, and they are especially boring when they have a lot of text. People browsing your website certainly won’t put much effort into reading your ads – and they’re there to browse, not work – so it’s up to you to make the list as easy to process as possible. […] Icons beside feature description in lists work like bullet points: they’re little anchors on the page which our eyes can easily focus.
Quote from “The Smashing Book“.
I would like to share with you three valuable web resources that you can use to get the web icons you want.
IconFinder.net is a database of over 156,000 icons / 484 icon sets. You can download the icons in either .PNG or .ICO format. They have different sizes ranging from 12×12 to 256x256px. The search feature of the website is customizable: you can set total results per page, the background of the icons, a license filter (2 options: No license filtering, Allowed for commercial use). If you know a good icon set / or have one that you created and want to share it with others you have the option to “Submit icon set”.
FindIcons.com has a large searchable free icons database with a sophisticated search filtering and a result matching system both making possible for you to get an icon you need in every design tasks. Every search query is tracked and the search results are manually adjusted according to average ratings to the search results by all users. You can group frequently used icons in your personal Favorites box, offering you an alternative option other than having to put favorite icons into folders in your hard drive.
IconShock is a 8 year old company with full experience in interface-oriented design. Being experts in conceptualizing and creating icons they offer a large icon collection over internet with near 500.000 unique icons having the highest quality. Most of them come with the source files that allows you to make your own changes.
