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Feather: Open-source icons

844 points| mcone | 8 years ago |feathericons.com | reply

140 comments

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[+] huhtenberg|8 years ago|reply
Seems like a good time to mention an absolutely awesome - https://icomoon.io/app

It allows cherry-picking icons from dozens of different SVG icon packs (including Feather) and packaging them into a custom (web)font. It can also be used to package your own SVG assets into a single font file and then use resulting .woff as an SVG sprite sheet.

[+] amelius|8 years ago|reply
Why not use separate SVG files? You could reference them as data-url from the CSS to save round-trips.

Perhaps it's just me but using a font to store icons seems arcane.

[+] component|8 years ago|reply
Should be noted the _bundled_ SVG set of Feather on icomoon is out of date.
[+] sb8244|8 years ago|reply
Icomoon is amazing but so frustratingly slow with large sets
[+] whipoodle|8 years ago|reply
I favor using image formats for images, and fonts for text :)
[+] vforgione|8 years ago|reply
There's a Chrome icon, but no Firefox or Safari or Edge or any other browser. Not even a generic. Can we please stop with the implicit homogenization around Chrome?

/rant

[+] nostromo|8 years ago|reply
It's open source... Why don't you make one?
[+] vntok|8 years ago|reply
This is not a conspiracy, you know.

There is a reason the set contains a Twitter icon and not a Mastodon icon, a Facebook icon and not a Diaspora* icon, a CodePen icon and not a Dabblet icon, etc. Like it or not, these are the products that the people elected.

[+] jwilk|8 years ago|reply
What's the use case for Chrome icon anyway?
[+] consto|8 years ago|reply
While I see what you mean, there is compass which is essentially the safari logo, and there is a globe which can be used as a generic browser.
[+] wlesieutre|8 years ago|reply
"compass" is identical to the Safari logo
[+] jannes|8 years ago|reply
I really like that these are SVG icons with a minimal amount of paths rather than an icon font.
[+] pvinis|8 years ago|reply
All these icon collections are great, but I always find missing stuff there, and I don't know how this can be fixed besides complaining (and I don't want to complain when they give it for free).

For example, this one looks really nice, but it only has 'battery' and 'battery-charging'. In an app I work on, I need battery with no charge, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, and charging.

Then I think that this would be small to add, but again I don't want to complain. Then maybe someone will need a battery with a sliding charge, so they can represent as many charge percentages as the pixels allow. And then this becomes a whole other things, and not just an icon collection..

[+] jannes|8 years ago|reply
This is the full SVG source code for the battery icon:

<svg width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"><rect x="1" y="6" width="18" height="12" rx="2" ry="2"></rect><line x1="23" y1="13" x2="23" y2="11"></line></svg>

It shouldn't be too hard to add another rectangle with whatever width you want. Just open up the dev tools and play around with it.

[+] usaphp|8 years ago|reply
> In an app I work on, I need battery with no charge, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, and charging.

These icons are provided in svg format. You can open it in Sketch app, draw a rectangle to show Desiree battery level, the click on the path and click "export/save as SVG".

[+] vijaybritto|8 years ago|reply
The icons are beautiful. But one off the topic thing here is that the webpage loads superfast in 3g in India. Can the site builders talk about the loading perf a bit?
[+] lnx01|8 years ago|reply
My guess is that they're SVG, which makes them absolutely miniscule. Beyond that the page is simple, little if any js, minimal CSS, and no images.
[+] alexdrans|8 years ago|reply
The whole page is 58KB
[+] ISL|8 years ago|reply
To pull criddell's important question to root-level:

How can the trademarked logos (Facebook, Instagram, Github, etc.) be provided without licensing terms?

[+] onli|8 years ago|reply
Which licensing terms? That has nothing to do with each other. This icon set is foss, that means the sources are free and you can use the icons as you wish, as long as not otherwise encumbered. For the brand icons the source code is free, but if you use them in a way that conflicts with the trademark holder rights they can sue (depending on your jurisdiction).

That's why patents are such a big danger to FOSS software, because that's an equivalent situation.

[+] athenot|8 years ago|reply
It's (more of) a trademark issue instead of a copyright one.

Basically, you use your own prudence when displaying references to a business (be it with their official branding or with an indirect reference). Of course, many businesses will try to strengthen their brand recognition by insisting you use their official branding or nothing… and only in ways they approve, lest you get on the wrong side of their legal team.

[+] koolba|8 years ago|reply
I don't think these icons are particularly beautiful. Not sure if it's because of the simplicity or anti-aliasing, but something just seems off.
[+] thinbeige|8 years ago|reply
Great site and there are also other quite helpful suggestions in the thread such as Icomoon.

Problem is that the next time I need SVG icons I will forget these sites, try to google them and ending up on those sites that perform well on Google's SERPs but want money for clean SVGs.

This happened to me two days ago and I just fired up Inkscape and remade those icons. However, this took too long.

How can I remember such sites the next time I need them?

[+] joepie91_|8 years ago|reply
I've started tagging my bookmarks, by simply adding a bunch of words that I associate with a page behind the bookmark name in parentheses. So for example, I might add "(open source svg icon fonts font set)" behind the bookmark name for this.

9 out of 10 times I can easily find the bookmark I'm looking for, by entering a few of those words into my bookmark search and/or address bar, and it doesn't require any special extensions or services.

[+] RonanTheGrey|8 years ago|reply
I use Chrome, predominantly. At least, for my bookmark library. When you save a bookmark in Chrome, it defaults to using the page title as the bookmark description.

I have started renaming the bookmarks - I leave the relevant part of the title (removing irrelevant stuff like brands, brand descriptions etc.) and then I add a set of keywords I associate with the link.

Later, when I want to find it, and call I can remember are some words I associate with the link, I type them in Chrome's search bar and it usually ends up matching at least 1 or 2 that I picked for the title, so Chrome finds the bookmark.

It is not a flawless system but it is effectively bookmark tagging without any additional tools. It's also based on how I associate the memory, and not on whatever random (and usually useless SEO-based text) the page creator decided to use for the title; which means that recalling the link is alot more straightforward because the way we hook memories tends to be really consistent.

[+] Max_Mustermann|8 years ago|reply
Start organizing your resources in bookmark folders!
[+] GradDev|8 years ago|reply
I use Evernote webclipper. You can tag the bookmarks and find them later.
[+] totony|8 years ago|reply
What does the MIT license mean in this context? Let's say you use the icons, where should the notice be put?
[+] tlb|8 years ago|reply
Those are nice. Appropriately clean and unflavored for an open-source visual resource.
[+] triangleman|8 years ago|reply
Is this strange anti-aliasing normal? Is the octagon with an exclamation point in it supposed to look like that?

https://img42.com/YAV3Y

[+] ttd|8 years ago|reply
Pixel-perfect is hard to do in SVG (at least in my experience). You have to be careful to align path geometry to half-pixel values so that whole-number stroke widths end up falling on a pixel boundary. And once you start scaling the SVG to fit a particular view box, that careful placement usually gets trashed.
[+] ndh2|8 years ago|reply
Doesn't look like that in my browser, here it's looking good.
[+] fwx|8 years ago|reply
What benefits does this provide over using Font Awesome icons?
[+] sailfast|8 years ago|reply
Cool site! Always a fan of getting more design options out there for icons / UX in applications.

Bit of a tangent for product folks:

A lot of this stuff actually does look beautiful, but the use of "beautiful" as a modifier has diluted the term for me. When I click on something labeled "beautiful" I almost always expect to see "meh", and most of the time, that's exactly what happens.

[+] zimpenfish|8 years ago|reply
It mildly bothers me that the stroke for phone-off is the opposite direction to all the other *-off icons.
[+] wolframhempel|8 years ago|reply
They're beautiful, but I'd much rather use them as an icon font. Is there any way to do that?
[+] flixic|8 years ago|reply
Fonts are more convenient to use, but they usually don't display as sharply as SVGs. Generally icons should be only shown at the size they were design for. With icon fonts some sharpness is possible, even if difficult, but it still doesn't look as good as SVGs.
[+] ape4|8 years ago|reply
Just wondering, is it legal to remake a company's logo (eg instagram)
[+] nkristoffersen|8 years ago|reply
I pay for noun project but sometimes libraries like this are easier :-)