I sometimes get emailed by customers asking where they can get the icons used in my sample applications. I actually bought them from IconExperience a few years ago and they have proved excellent value for money. Decent icons are a must for any professional application and the quickest way to improve the feel of your program.
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At my last permanent job the main objective of the project I worked on was to update the look and feel of the legacy application. The functionality of the software was fine but the user interface was battleship gray and looked very dated. Given that enterprise customers were paying around $500k for the software the potential customers had much higher expectations. For that kind of money the CFO expects it to at least look familiar, they want it to resemble the Excel and Word applications they use all day.
So two of us spent a year updating the front end and created a modern looking professional system with the Office 2007 style appearance. Because we were using a third party control suite the user could even change the themed appearance to some of the other options the vendor provided out of the box. All that was left was to create some new icons that matched modern expectations. The existing ones were 16 color bitmaps created by a programmer many years before. Yes, I really do mean 16 colors and not 16bit color!
You can probably guess what is coming. You won’t believe this but I swear it’s absolutely true. After paying two developers for a year, costing around $160k, my boss would not spend a few thousand getting some professional icons created. Given the functionality of the system it really needed a designer to create custom images, stock icons would not contain the type of specialized icons we needed.
Complete madness. The whole point of the project is to update the front end to compete with competitors that had more modern looking systems. After spending a big chunk of money on development they would not spend a few measly thousand adding the final polish. To this day I imagine some salesman giving a presentation of the app with the Office 2007 Blue color scheme, and there at the top are a row of 16 color bitmaps worthy of a shareware app from 1990. No wonder programmers want to work for themselves.
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You can actually get quite a few free icons if you look around. Here are some links worth investigating…
Mono Factor – 25 Free Vista Icons
Web Appers – Free Web App Icons Set
ZeusBox Studio – Free RSS Feed Icons
VistaIco – Free Vista Style Icons
DryIcons – Free for non-commercial use
Smashing magazine has an article that links to even more resources. Check it out if you want to delve deeper into the free icons scene.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
aha-soft diserves being added to your icons providers list IMO:
http://www.aha-soft.com/iconlibs.htm
The interesting thing with them is that you can purchase any of their icons individually for just $5 each.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
famfamfam has some great icons. His work is spread all over the web. They only come in 16×16 which is the only down side.
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
They’re great icons.
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
I think the real tragedy was that your old boss was probably paid that few grand to make that terrible decision.
May 24th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Heard of the Tango icon theme? Also, you should add glyFX, there is where I got the free icons for my app.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:23 am
There is an awesome set of free icons available on Everaldo.com – http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/. They have over 1300 icons in the set.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
You can also tell people to search for a lot of creative commons icons now: http://www.onlineobservations.net/the-icon-search-engine/
May 28th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
It’s be interesting to see you utilise some of these icons in the toolkit. I am now so used to IconExperience and feel awkward about using the new Vista Type ones.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Word to Calvin, I use the Tango stuff all the time:
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library