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By Daved Brosche, Naveed Javaid and Smashing Editorial Team

When it comes to freebie designs, beautiful icons sets are tops. Designers scour for these free treasures more than anything else. You can use icon sets in Web applications, website designs and on your desktop. If well designed, they make a great impression on others. Beautifully designed icons also prove the quality of a designer’s work, so many designers make theirs freely available online, thus giving their work more exposure.

In the overview below, we present 50 beautifully designed, free and professional high-quality icons for desktop and Web design. All of them can be freely used for private projects, and some are available for commercial use as well. Regardless, always read the licenses — they may change from time to time.

You can also scan through our other icon-related articles:

• 40 Professional Icon Sets for Free Download
  Download some fresh, professional icon goodies.
• 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
  Spice up your posts with nice illustrations, or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons.
• Icons for Your Desktop and Icons for Your Web Designs
  High-quality free icons that you can use for your desktop and Web designs.
• 20 Free and Fresh Icon Sets
  Over 20 free beautiful sets and links to other free icon libraries.

[Offtopic: by the way, do you know the Smashing Network has its own Smashing Network RSS Feed? Only excerpts are displayed in the feed.]

50 Beautiful, Free and High-Quality Icon Sets

Container Icon Pack
Container Icon Pack contains 40 high-quality (256 x 256 pixel) icons in PNG and ICO formats. This package includes box, cargo, trash icons and more. Created by Mehmet Gozetlik.

Baggy Icon Set
Contains five high-quality icons in three formats (ICO, ICNS and PNG) and six sizes, ranging from 16 to 512 pixels!

Round theme icons
A beautiful set of 106 various rounded icons.

Fortune 500 Badges
Over 200 badges of famous brands, PSDs included.

Red Moleskine
Red Moleskine is a beautiful icon set in PNG format and sizes of 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512 pixels.

Old-School Icon Set
A set of six beautiful old-ish icons: typewriter, camera, radio, TV set, Gameboy, and telephone. In PNG and ICO.

Playground
Nine beautiful and original icons (in PNG and ICO), created by the talented Miriam Moshinsky.

Windows 7 Build
A set of various basic software and office icons.

Classic Timer Icon
A quality timer icon in transparent vector format, with different sizes.

Nes Icons Pack
A set of retro icons (TV, NES, Pad, Alimentation box, Zelda box, Zelda game, Desktop, 1up, Magic Toad) in ICO and PNG (512 × 512 pixels).

Jeans Feed Icons
A set of stylish feed icons as denim pockets.

Cemagraphics Icons
A set of various beautiful icons in PNG (32 × 32 and 512 × 512 pixels).

To-Do List Icon
Use these icons in your Web applications to make them more attractive.

Social Media Handycons
Handycons is a free hand-drawn set of 12 social-media icons. All icons are available in four sizes: 16, 24, 32 and 48 pixels.

Canon 400D + lens 17-85mm
Set of two icons: camera and lens. Comes in sizes of 512 and 16 pixels and iContainer, ICNS, PNG and ICO format.

Retrofukation
A stylish set of icons to complement almost any theme out there. Designed to be easily distinguishable, simple and intuitive. This icon pack contains over 100 icons. Designed by Jamie Green.

e-Commerce Icons
A huge set of icons that you can use for an online shop.

Function icons set
A beautiful and useful set of 128 icons, available in 48 × 48 pixels.

Elementary Icons
A set of smaller Web developer-style icons.

Human 02
Here is a nice multi-purpose icon set for your business website.

32px Mania Icon Set
Another series of smaller icons that can add flair to any website design.

Business Icons
A collection of random business-related icons with a Web 2.0 look.

Chums Icon Set
This is the ultimate collection of high-quality tech-related icons. You can find everything from iPods to digital cameras.

Tom Tom
Does your business deal with GPS and navigation systems? Then this is the icon set for you.

Black Neon Agua Icons
A unique icon set that is ideal for darker website designs.

Credit Cards Icons
15 beautiful credit card icons in AI and EPS format. And here are yet more credit card icons.

Antique Icons
A set of antique icons in PNG, ICNS and ICO formats, ranging from 16 × 16 to 256 × 256 pixels.

Hand-made food and beverage icon set
Seventeen hand-drawn icons, created by Victor Amanatidis.

Social Media Mini Iconpack
This icon set consists of 30 finely crafted social media icons in a size of 16 × 16 pixels. They are free to use non-commercially.

Manto Smiley Icon Set
Twenty original emoticons by Chinese designer Manto.

Emotions For WordPress Icons
Emoticons for WordPress.

Green and Blue Icon Set
Five icons, each in 128 × 128 pixels and PNG format. Included are icons to represent gallery, downloads, emoticons, calendar and folder.

Airport Express
This icon is for personal use only. Download includes iContainer, PNG and PSD formats.

Coquette Part 3 Icons
This free playful icon set contains curvy and colorful icons made with one goal: to get some affection and playfulness into your projects. The 50 high-quality icons come in sizes of 16, 32, 48, 64 and 128 pixels, and in 32-bit transparency PNG format.

Email Me Icons
These icons are free for personal use and available in 32, 48, 64 and 128 pixels.

Reality
A set of beautiful, realistic icons of different daily-use object. These are free for non-commercial use.

Music Icons
Beautiful icons of music instruments. Icons are absolutely free for any purpose.

Sleek XP: Basic Icons
A set of 50 stock icons in PNG and ICO formats.

Set of Social Icons
A set of beautiful social icons in PNG format and sizes of 16, 32 and 64 pixels.

GP Icons
A set of 23 PNG icons of different software products. Has a great grunge style.

Banking Stuff Icons
Banking-related icons for non-commercial use, in sizes of 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256 pixels.

Smashing Magazine’s Icons

Smashing Retro Icon Set
A set of 10 beautiful, high-quality “vintage” icons. The set contains 10 original icons: search, sign-up, calendar, news, RSS, comments, email, ads, home and address.

Flavours Icon Set
This set, aimed to help designers in their Web and user interface designs, contains 177 icons in a resolution of 48×48 pixels. The files are available in the PNG and PSD sources, so you can modify the files as you wish. Created by Oliver Twardowski.

Stationery Icons Set
A useful set of 22 vector icons (256 × 256 pixels). It contains book, brush, crayon, clip, color pencils, document, eraser, pad, palette, post-it note, scale and scissors, as well as the Fireworks source file.

On Stage Icons Set
The set contains 49 free vector icons, including PSD, which can be useful for both corporate and personal projects. You can use the set for free, without any restrictions whatsoever. The icons are available in PNG format in a resolution 128×128 pixels. Also included in the package are 100% pure shape-based layered PSDs.

Fresh Icons Set
This set contains 59 raster and vector icons. The set includes icons in PNG, ICNS and ICO formats. An EPS vector file is available as well.

Practica Icons Set
A free set of 11 useful high-quality icons, designed by DryIcons especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons are available in resolutions of 64, 128 and 256 pixels, in 32-bit transparency PNG format.

About the author

Naveed Javaid is a Web designer and runs the blog SmashingApps, which focuses on free resources and inspiration especially for designers and developers. If you want to connect with the author, you can follow him on Twitter.

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