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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.

However, designing a high-quality icon set isn’t an easy task. It takes time, patience and resources and it requires professional skills and experience. We are regularly looking for talented artists and creative designers and we are happy to support them as much as possible — e.g. by showcasing their work in our magazine. If you are going to create an icon set and experience any problems releasing it or spreading the word — let us know, we may figure something out.

In the overview below we present 40 excellent, free and professional icons for desktop and web design. Some of them can be used for both private and commercial projects. You may always use them for fre in your private projects. Nevertheless, it is always worth to take a look at the license agreements — they can change from time to time.

You can also scan through the icons-related articles we’ve published before:

• 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
  to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons,
• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs
  with fresh high-quality free icons which you can use for your desktop; we also showcase free professional icon sets, buttons and vector graphics you can use for your web designs,
• 20 Free And Fresh Icon Sets
  with over 20 free, beautiful and fresh icon sets as well as references to further free icon libraries,
• Freebies Round-Up: Icons, Buttons and Templates
  with fresh high quality icons, buttons, vector graphics, templates and layouts.

This time you’ll find quite many tasty snacks. Literally.

By the way, what was the last time you visited our sister site Noupe? Subscribe to Noupe's feed for more inspirational and design-related articles.

Free Icons For Your Web Designs

Office Space Icon Set
This set contains a coffee icon, chair icon, employee icon, coffee machine icon, computer display icon and information kiosk icon. Each icon is available in size 16×16px, 32×32px, 48×48px and 256×256px. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. This means that if you use the icons on your web site, please place a link to www.visualpharm.com on the same pages the icons are used.

Light Icons Set
A set of 22 light, clean and stylish icons created by Krzystof Kolatorski from Poland.

Transport Icon Set
This set of ready-made icons represents 35 objects of various modern transport facilities such as Cars, Airplanes, Helicopters, Trucks, Public conveyances, Squad car, Fire-engine, Ambulance, Taxi, Ships, etc. Free for personal use. .png, .ico. 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64, 128×128, 256×256.

Old School Icon Pack
Old School Icon Pack contains 82 high quality (256×256 pixels) icons; PNG and ICO formats. This package includes: Extra Icons, File Icons, Folder Icons, Hardware Icons, Software Icons etc. Free for personal use only.

The Simpsons Icons
11 Simpsons icons for Mac OS X and Windows. Designed by Anton Gerasimenko and Egor Zhgun from Russia. The link for the windows-version seems to be broken. Size: 128×128px.

Rss icons campaign
A large set of creative RSS icons designed by Design Freak.

Ice Cream Icons
A set of 15 sweet, shiny and tasty ice and cake icons. Size: 128×128, formats: .ico and .png. Designed by dim.po.

Ruby on Rails icon pack
Contains 3 color variations of the Ruby on Rails folder icon in 5 different sizes. Also includes a squared version of Rails logo in 5 different sizes.

Set of Stylized Icons
Designed by Lucas (aka pho3nix-bf) from Poland. The YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook icon may be used in online-projects.

Sticker Pack
A pack of stick-on icons whicih contains 41 individual sticky icons with large resources for Vista & Leopard. Designed by David Lanham. iContainer, Mac, Win.

128×128: Toast It!
A toaster icon, 128×128px.

Icon Goodies
7 free icon goodies created by created by Chris Ivarson. Mac only. For instace, the Blogs icon pack includes Blogger icon, Livejournal icon, Wordpress icon and Xanga icon. Free to use.

Smashing RSS/Feed Icons
A free Smashing RSS/Feed icon set. The set contains 8 icons which you can use for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free. The icons are available for both Mac and Win-users in resolutions 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px.

Bright! icon set
Bright! is a crisp, sharp and beautiful set of 148 hand-crafted icons in vector format, ideally for both web and print work. You can use Bright! for personal and commercial projects at free of charge. Comments and backlinks are appreciated.

Freaky Crema
Cake and ice cream icons designed by dim.po from Russia. Crema Badges are also available for free download.

Build Your Own Box Kit
“Build Your Own Box” kit allows you to take a layered, Photoshop PSD file and add your own items inside. Logos, icons, anything. Some free icons are included in the PSD file as well. A How-To-Video (Quicktime) explains how you can create your icons using the .psd-file.

Nicely Stuffed
Six Colors + Leopard Ready. Designed by Max Gilchuk from Canada.

Antares Icon Pack
Antares Complete Pack contains 100 high quality (256×256 pixels) icons; PNG and ICO formats. This package includes: Blue Ray Disk icon, CD Drive icon, iMac OSX icon, iMac icon, Finder icon, Mail icon, Safari icon, iTunes icon, Trash icon, Dashboard icon etc. File Types: .ico, .png. Icon Sizes: 256×256, 128×128, 16×16, 32×32, 48×48.

Laurent Baumann | Icons
The Film Roll icon set contains 1 icon in sizes 16×16px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px. Formats: icns and .png. These icons are released under Creative Commons License. Designed by Laurent Baumann.

Pool Icons
Do you have snow in winter? We do. A lot of snow. But now spring has finally come and we can’t ignore it. We’ve been waiting for so long! So here is a free icon set about what we see in the streets in spring. You can download Win and Mac icons as well as PNG files.

Coffee Break Icon Set
10 freeware icons inspired by some delicious coffee foods. Content: Apple, Breads, Cheese, Coffee cups, Coffee pot, Cookies, Toast. Designed by Dirceu Veiga.

OSE PNGs
Free for personal use, but can be modified and released afterwards. This set also includes PSDs.

Email Me Icon Set
11 icons, 128×128px, created for the Mozdev.org projects. Free for personal use only. Designed by Mario Martínez from Mayosoft.

I’m not a Patriot
Flags of 32 countries + 2 communities, resulting in 34 png-images of file size 256×256px.

Social Web Buttons
Two “social” sets, each consisting of 20 images in .png-format. Released under Creative Commons license. The sets include buttons for Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, LastFM, Pownce and Slideshare.

Windows Outlook
1 png (256px). For private and noncommercial use only. By Vande Mataram.

Mobile Device Icons
60 mobile device icons in 128×128 and 60 mobile device icons in 256×256. In .PNG format for whatever you use them for. If you’re looking for blackberry icons, check here. Courtesy of ~pierocksmysocks from US.

Choose your sport Icons
8 original icons about sport areas. Available for both Windows and Mac OS X. Size: 256×256px and 512×512px.

Sketchy Paper Icon Set
Icons are created with simple, sketchy lines on a unique background – a paper note. So, get creative when using the set, hope it brings a new, unique light on your projects. The set contains 20 high quality, free icons in these sizes: 16×16px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 64×64px and 128×128px and 32-bit transparency PNG file format. 20 icons in .ico, .png and .icns format. You can also purchase these icons — then you may use them without being obligated to put a back link.

Mini Icon Sets

Vaga
This set of 60, semi-transparent .png icons (16 x 16) ready to use and available for free download. Released by Ed Merritt.

Monofactor Icon Set
This icon set, created by Onur Oztaskiran, 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. You are completely free to edit, change and/or directly use the icons in your site and in any kind of your projects.

Web Development Icons
24×24 free icon set in web 2.0 style. These icons are free to use in any kind of project unlimited times. Released under Creative Commons license. Windows only.

Circular Icons
Circular is a free icon set containing 100+ free to use icons. It’s a themed collection of 100+ 16×16 icons designed by Ben Gillbanks. The icons are available as a zip download of alpha transparent png’s (link over there on the right), and cost a grand total of nothing!