35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

• By Vitaly Friedman
• March 6th, 2008
• Downloads, Icons
• 251 Comments

When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online.

In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. The result: hundreds and hundreds of sets available almost everywhere, usually not that well executed and often duplicated from other sets. However, there are indeed free high-quality icon sets. And this post is supposed to prove exactly that.

Below we present 35 incredible free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons. Some of the listed icons can be used in web designs, some of them are supposed to be primarily for desktop. So hopefully everybody will find something useful.

You might want to take a look at the following articles we’ve presented earlier:

• 20 Free And Fresh Icon Sets
• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs,
• Freebies Round-Up: Icons and Templates
• 50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008 (Noupe)

Please notice: not all listed freebies can be used for commercial projects, however you can use all of them in your private projects of for you personal purposes. Please read the disclaimers carefully before using the icons – they’re changing from time to time.

Free Icons For Your Web Designs

Bagg & Box Telecharger Icon Pack
70 high-quality free icons released under a Creative Commons license. You can use them as illustrations for your posts or as buttons on your weblog.

Mammoth Icons
4 freeware icons inspired by prehistoric Mammoths. They might fit perfectly to spice up your blog with some pretty funny character.

Dino Icons
6 freeware icons of cute dinosaurs and cavemen.

Cemagraphics Icons
Includes .png and .ico in sizes 512px, 256px, 128px, 64px and 32px.

Wifun Icons
Website navigation icons.

City Icons
The City icon pack contains 16 high quality (256×256 pixels) icons; PNG and ICO formats. This package includes: Hollywood Ticket icon, Umbrella icon, Hot Dog Car icon, Mail icon, Bench icon and more.

Irish Icon Pack
26 Irish icons which you can use to brighten up your blog with some unique and beautiful icons.

Simpsons Mail Icons
The Simpsons: 7 512 × 512px .png and .ico icons.

Free Web Applications Icon Set
There are 20 icons designed specially for web applications (e.g. Charts, Profile, Search, Add, Delete, Email, Print, Warning and etc…). Icons come in 3 sizes; 48×48 px, 32×32 px, and 24×24 px. All of them are in PNG format with transparent background. Web Application Icons Set is completely Free for both personal and commercial projects in any way you like.

Knob Buttons Toolbar Icons
These are 39 icons in PNG, ICNS, TIFF and ICO formats, Mac and Windows compatible, 32×32 pixels dimensions only. You are free to use these icons on your software application or website.

Monofactor Free Vector Icon Set
The first part of the set contains 25 scalable Illustrator format icons. You can open the .ai file with any version of Illustrator above 8.0. With earlier versions, you might loose some of the effects on the icons.

Polaroid Icon
512×512px .PNG.

TV Icon
Perfect for an occasional blog post related to TV.

Apple Mail Icons

Sticky Pack
38 icons, 128×128, png, psd.

Feedicons 2
33 impressive RSS-feed icons. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works.

Users Icon Set
11 user icons with functions like add, chat, edit, offline, remove, send, upload, user, user group, video chat, voice chat.

RSS-icons
9 icons.

PI Diagona Pack
400 (200+200) icons are included in PNG format.

Free Icons For Your Desktop & Dock Icons

Niome Icon Pack
This pack contains 90 high quality (256×256 pixels) icons; PNG and ICO formats. This package includes: Disc Icons, File Icons, Folder Icons, Hardware Icons, Network Icons, Other Icons, Start Menu Icons, Symbol Icons and more.

iVista Icon Pack 2
This pack 2 contains 92 (256×256 pixels) icons; PNG and ICO formats. This package includes: Alarm Icons, CDs & DVDs Icons, Devices Icons, Files Icons, Folder Icons, Network Icons, Other Icons, Start Menu Icons and more.

Flat Panel Monitor Icon
128px desktop & application icon. Don’t forget to check out the PDP Panel Icon.

Green Icon set
9 icons.

Onibari + Onibari Light Icon Packs
Two sets of desktop icons released under a Creative Commons license. More icons.

iMac Icon
The package includes both PNG & ICO format.

Vista Aero Pack
135 full sized Windows Vista icons, in large .png formats for free. Our 256×256 PNG images rival most sites that give you only small ICO files that can not be used for other things than icons.

Simplistica
The set includes useful application and web icons which come in the sizes 16x16px, 32x32px, 48x48px and 128x128px and 32-bit transparency PNG file format. PSD’s are included as well.

Simplexity File Icons
Includes 120 different file extension icons in both png and icon format (31mb). All major file extensions are included.

Black Pearl
39 black pearl file pngs, containing almost all popular file formats. All pngs in 256 × 256px. Not for commercial use.

Adobe Work Folders
.PNG format and vary in ranges from 256, 128, 96, 64, 32 & 16 pixels, .ICO (win) format and vary in ranges from 256, 128, 96, 64, 32 & 16 pixels, al in 32 & 24 bit color, .ICNS (mac) format and vary in ranges from 128, 96, 64, 32 & 16 pixels in 24 bit color (*.icl format library included for Windows)

HP Dock Icon Set
1024px, 512px, 256px. All file types are .PNG.

Further Resources

• More Excellent Freebies
  Over 90 icon sets, collected on a one single page.
• Iconbulk
• Iconsfree.org