Icons8 Blog
icons8.com · Company blog · on HN since 2013
Icons8 is an icon and design resource company whose blog covers design tools, icon sets, and product lessons.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend the Icons8 site as a good source of icons, and note its freemium model and a DMCA mishap.
42HN people shared it
36linked it in comments
18stories submitted
281story points
11 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Show HN: Lunacy – Standalone Sketch Viewer for Windows19 people · 7 points · first shared 2017 · 3 comments on HN
- 2Homepage8 people · first shared 2014
- 3Large-scale DMCA campaign fail3 people · 8 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 4What Can You Learn from People Who Drew 30,000 Icons?2 people · 5 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 5Free iOS7 vector icons set by VisualPharm2 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 6Ouch2 people · first shared 2019
- 7Music2 people · first shared 2018
- 8How We Lost User Engagement After a Redesign1 people · 219 points · first shared 2016 · 97 comments on HN
- 9Only 30% Use Traditional Boarding Passes. Is It Worth Keeping?1 people · 11 points · first shared 2016 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Analysing Drawings for Neural Network1 people · 11 points · first shared 2016 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Why You Shouldn’t Ask a Developer to Fix Your Bike1 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · 3 comments on HN
- 12How People Search Icons? A Usability Study1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 13How Boarding Pass Design Can Save Two Human Lives per Year1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 14Blind Method of Hiring a Software Developer1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 155 Designers Draw a Bicycle Icon: A Fiverr Experiment1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
masa331 · 2022-02-16
For anybody just looking for nice icons instead of a open-source discussion i can also recommend https://icons8.com. They are the same freemium model as these
seanwilson · 2021-01-25
SVG screenshots are documented here: https://www.checkbot.io/article/web-page-screenshots-with-svg/
The main trick is to view your web app in a browser, print to PDF and then use Inkscape to auto convert from PDF -> SVG (with some caveats). Worst case you could recreate the screenshot from scratch in a vector editor.
The SVG icons are licensed from https://icons8.com/ (recommended!).
busterc · 2014-06-12
Just yesterday, while developing a Cordova hybrid app intended to target iOS, Android & Windows Phone 8, this very notion became unsettlingly apparent for me. BTW, http://icons8.com is a great place to do icon recon.
Personally, I like the iOS 6 icon over the iOS 7 version. They're almost the same, except the new one places too much emphasis on "up." For example, when using the Meme Producer app and you want to save the picture to your photo library, the app uses the iOS 7 "action" icon but it feels awkward to then immediately go to the "download" icon to actually save. http://i.imgur.com/YtVd5WZ.jpg
lolinder · 2024-01-01
Looks like it is—they started out with the same color scheme just without the splashes [0], then changed the colors when someone recognized it. From the thread it sounds like an honest mistake (though one that probably warranted stronger corrective action than just changing the colors). They seem to have assumed that everything on icons8 [1] was up for grabs, when in fact a lot of trademarks are on there.
[0] https://github.com/webui-dev/webui/issues/100#issuecomment-1545044899
[1] https://icons8.com/
Icons8 · 2023-02-02
We've built a very similar feature across https://icons8.com content.
What keeps exciting me when you upload a photo of a building and find tiny icons with a somewhat similar architecture, or illustrations, or realistic renders/other photos.
pen2l · 2022-09-17
Quant-UX is worth a look for prototyping needs, it's OSS as well and can generate end HTML/CSS code: https://quant-ux.com/
Lunacy supports multi-player in the way Figma users are used to: https://icons8.com/lunacy
Frame / Plasmic generates code, the latter focusing on React: https://www.framer.com / https://www.plasmic.app/
But yes it does appear that Penpot for now is the most obvious de facto Figma alternative.
The silver lining of this whole debacle has been that it's brought to surface a lot of other alternatives that folks would not have otherwise considered or looked into, which are actually quite decent I'm finding out.
cratermoon · 2022-06-27
lf-non · 2022-02-12
Unrelated to the primary topic, but I have been trying out a new free (as in beer) app called lunacy [1] for prototyping and the experience has been great.
I am not a UX professional so can't comment on feature parity with Figma etc.
It was however interesting to discover that the native cross platform app was powered by dotnet core & the open source Avalonia framework[2]. It looks quite polished and the framework seems to have come a long way since I tried a few years ago.
[1] https://icons8.com/lunacy
[2] http://avaloniaui.net/
peterschmidt · 2020-08-12
The one on the website if I recall correctly was mostly designed in house. Gonna double check that with the designer. The blog post image was taken from https://icons8.com/illustrations (free).
There are actually a lot of free illustration libraries nowadays. One of my favorite is https://undraw.co/
ignoramous · 2019-12-22
I have used undraw.co and the illustrations are plenty, neat, and customizable to a degree. For something that's royalty-free, it is an incredible body of work.
Here are some more related resources I've seen recommended by others:
Photoshop but for Illustrations (paid): https://www.drawkit.io/peach
https://icons8.com/ouch
https://www.humaaans.com/
https://www.manypixels.co/gallery/
rjf72 · 2019-01-30
It might be helpful to check out Icons8. They seem to be operating under a similar idea to what you're looking for. Their licensing page is here: https://icons8.com/license
I think they also have a great business model in general.
arthurfm · 2018-12-15
There's a third-party app for Windows called Lunacy [1] that can read/write Sketch files, so there must be a market large enough to make that worthwhile.
[1] https://icons8.com/lunacy
girish_h · 2014-07-05
vedmed · 2024-05-01
Lunacy does this for free. And you don't need to log in. And it has a native linux client.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
FireInsight · 2023-02-27
Here's a big list of different free svg icons websites:
https://www.svgrepo.com/
https://iconify.design/
https://iconduck.com/
https://icons8.com/ (https://icons8.com/line-awesome)
https://www.flaticon.com/ (attribution warning)
https://www.iconfinder.com/
rvz · 2022-09-28
Cisco will probably buy Penpot and maintain it the same way after how Zoom bought Keybase. Microsoft will just buy Lunacy instead [0].
[0] https://icons8.com/lunacy
zigzag312 · 2022-09-23
For offline alternative to Figma check Lunacy. It's quite powerful, multiplatform and free. UI and workflow is well thought out.
It seems it's written in C# as it uses Avalonia UI.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
alistairjallan · 2022-09-16
Icons8 Lunacy is also quite an impressive and free Figma Alternative.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
satya71 · 2022-09-15
I have had good luck with Lunacy [1]. I hope they get some users from this sale.
[1] https://icons8.com/lunacy
banashark · 2022-05-23
For those looking for a linux-compatible solution, I've had some success with Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/
Specifically I made a small application with F# and the FuncUI library https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI
So far the most complex real-world application I've seen is Lunacy: https://icons8.com/lunacy
It's nice to have something like this out there. It definitely eased my apprehension of using the platform on the grounds of it being immature.
I've a decent amount of experience with Xamarin (Native and Forms), and so far I've had 1/100th of the build issues with Avalonia.
I am excited to try out MAUI however and see how things have evolved!
bradgessler · 2022-04-06
A library like https://icons8.com/icons where you can just tell it what icon you want and the style (e.g. Material, outline, solid, iOS). It would do it’s thing and spit it out.
password4321 · 2021-09-21
Maybe someone will be helped to discover https://icons8.com/lunacy - a free graphics program for Windows which works with Sketch files and supports basic operations.
j-kent · 2020-11-09
You might want to checkout Lunacy from Icons8, it is a free windows clone of Sketch that aims for 100% compatibility.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
nl · 2020-10-26
I have no idea what your priorities are, so it's hard to guess. XD doesn't support Linux either. Apparently https://icons8.com/lunacy runs on Windows and can import and export to Sketch.
Figma of course runs in a browser so works fine on all, and there is a Mobile UI toolkit for it: https://www.figma.com/templates/mobile-ui-kit/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/04/sketch-figma-adobe-xd-ui-desi…
https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/figma-vs-sketch-vs-adobe-xd/
But maybe what you need is... Adobe XD? I personally quite like it.
mattkevan · 2020-03-29
Just because it’s Mac only doesn’t mean you don’t own your own files. If you’re going to take it that far, being computer-only is a form of lock in too.
Having said that, there are windows apps that can work with sketch files. For example
https://icons8.com/lunacy
MrTrvp · 2019-03-17
https://icons8.com/lunacy
Lunacy is a good windows alternative to Sketch!
sunseb · 2018-10-19
Maybe it's because when you set fractional scaling you lose pixel perfect design (icons, images, and so).
https://icons8.com/articles/make-pixel-perfect-icons/
L0stLink · 2018-07-10
Try lunacy[1] it supports .sketch files and is quite good for the early stage it is in, sometimes it has strange behavior (e.g elements disappearing from the screen after dragging)and the navigation needs a bit of polish etc. hopefully they will get these issues ironed out soon in future updates. There are also online solutions like Figma[2] and Gravit Designer[3] which also has an electron based app for offline use. Not exactly a Sketch replacement but they will get the job done.
1. https://icons8.com/lunacy
2. https://www.figma.com/
3. https://gravit.io/
martin-adams · 2018-05-23
Royalty free music is a pain. I wanted to licence a music track for use for YouTube and a podcast, but it's just unclear if that requires different licences, and if it's a series, it may only cover a certain number of episodes and expire after some time before you have to buy again.
I did discover icons8's free music selection which is actually very good: https://icons8.com/music/
cryodesign · 2018-03-23
You can edit Sketch files on Windows, using the Lunacy app[0]. It's not full featured yet.
https://icons8.com/lunacy