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In December we asked few designers to come up with some creative, beautiful, memorable yet usable icon sets. Some designers had a tight schedule and couldn’t get work done in time, but three designers agreed and delviered their high-quality Christmas icon sets — right in time before the deadline. In this post we are glad to release three beautiful high-quality Christmas icon sets — you can use them for free without any restrictions whatsoever.

You can use all sets for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter.]

Smashing Christmas Icon Set

The Russian design studio SoftFacade has chosen a quite unusual approach in design of the Christmas icons set. They put a lot of efforts to come up with some really unusual approach. While the icons exhibit designers’ close attention to the smallest details, they are also very colorful and can be used to decorate your weblog according to the Christmas theme.

The set includes 10 icons — RSS, Shopping cart, Portfolio, Comment, Links, User, Calendar, Contacts, Social networks and Print. The icons are available in resolutions 64×64px, 128×128px and as illustrations in formats .png and .ico. The icons were designed exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers as the gift to the design community for Christmas. Download the set (.zip, 1 Mb)

• download the set (.zip, 1 Mb)

Here are some insights from the designers:

“We love Smashing Magazine and we read it regularly, which is why we were more than happy to design a Christmas icon set for the readers of Smashing Magazine. Together with the SM team we discussed what types of icons are more likely to be interesting and useful for a wide variety of SM readers, and decided to get creative to make the set literally stand out.

Afterwards we took some time to come up with metaphors that wouldn’t be as common and as boring as most Christmas icons are. We really wanted to design something memorable and outstanding. Once the rought drafts were done, we started to design icons in Photoshop.

In the end, icons have become very colorful, very unusual and with close attention to the smallest details — and, in our opinion, it perfectly fits to the atmosphere of Smashing Magazine. We are confident that these icons will help Smashing readers to get into the festive Christmas mood and make their web-sites even more beautiful.

With love to design from Russia, SoftFacade design studio.”

Dellixmas Christmas Icon Set

Wendell Fernandes, the designer behind the company LogoExpedite.com, created a more traditional Christmas icon set with 8 icons in dimensions 16×16px – 512×512px. The set contains icons Sitemap, Calendar, Search, Shopping cart, User and RSS. The Adobe Illustrator source image is available as well.

• download the set (.zip, 2.9 Mb)
• download the .ai source (.zip, 3.3 Mb)

Dock The Halls Icons Set

Paddy Donnelly, a designer from Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, has asked himself: why not ‘Christmassy’ up your dock and hang up the Adobe family’s stockings? This idea led to the ‘Dock the Halls’ icons set, a set of 20 icons that may put your dock or your blog in a festive mood. The Adobe Illustrator source file is available for free download as well.

• preview (.jpg)
• download the set (.zip, 0.7 Mb)
• download the .ai source (.zip, 2.6 Mb)

We express sincere gratitude to all designers for their time, their efforts and their good intentions. Thank you.