For designers, icons are an amazing tool for building layouts and apps that are quicker to interact with. It allows us to use a little less text than we normally would needed and helps people to navigate through our designs quicker.

However, icons design takes a lot of time and effort, thus it is hard to create custom icons for every project. Thanks to the internet and an awesome community of designers, there are now plenty of high-quality open source icon sets that you can download free of charge and customize according to your needs, here are a few of these.

1. Icons8

Icons8 offers a diverse collection of SVG icons designed for various applications and operating systems. They provide consistent style, quality, and customization options, making them popular among designers and developers. Their SVG icons are easily accessible through their online library, providing users with a convenient resource for high-quality visual elements.

2. Heroicons

Heroicons is a set that you’ll find useful for website or app development. It comes in line or solid mode, so it’s more likely to adapt to your design. If you are a designer, you can directly open the icons in figma or download them on Github. For developers, the website provides a very useful feature to copy the icon code in JSX or SVG format for simpler use.

3. Freepik Icons

Freepik is an online platform that provides a wide selection of free vectors, videos, fonts, icons, stock images, and many other assets. Freepik icons comprise over 10 million icons from a variety of categories, making it easy to find the right one for your project.

Icons come in a range of formats, including PNG and SVG, and all of them can be used for personal or commercial projects.

4. Flaticon

Flaticon is the largest icon library with over 10 million free vector icons – and they add new assets every single day. It has a wide selection of professional-grade icons created by designers from around the world. You can search for icons based on styles (icons, stickers, animated icons, interface icons) and keywords to find just what you need for your project. 

The website will also allow you to download the icon in various formats such as SVG, PNG, and EPS. In addition, it also offers an online editor so you can change the color and size of your icons.

5. Foundation Icons

This icon font is the companion to the widely popular Foundation framework. It is mostly for website and application building, and conveniently presented in sub-groups. It also has a noteworthy focus on accessibility.

6. Feather Icons

If you are looking for simple and easy-to-customize icons, Feather’s Icons got you covered. With 282 icons available for download, you will find pretty much any icon you could need for website or app developement. Their website also offers a convenient icon customizer you can use to directly download the icons in the right format.

7. Font Awesome

Font Awesome is a gigantic database of icons that go well beyond app development, but offers icons for all kinds of use. There are over 5’000 icons in Font Awesome, it even grew to be one of the most popular open source projects on Github.

The best part about Font Awesome is probably that it is regularly updated with new icons, as you can see on the COVID-19 icons below.

8. Css.gg Icons

A set of over 700 icons for development. Very convenient to use, as it offers plenty of download format: .css, .svg, .tsx, .fig, .xd, .json, .xml, making Css.gg the perfect tool for prototyping.

9. Ionicons

Ionicons is a nice set of icons that come in three flavors: outline, filled, or sharp. It also includes a useful set of logo icons, which can prove useful for social icons buttons or other uses.

About the Author

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Mirko Humbert

Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.