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Beautiful and free icon sets always come in handy. Used properly and moderately, icons can be helpful to provide users with memorable metaphors and illustrations that would provide a visual support for otherwise unspectacular text blocks. For instance, in web-applications memorable icons can be very helpful as they can make it easier for users to memorize how to perform some specific task or where to find some specific functions.

This large collection of recently released icon sets is supposed to help designers improve their designs on their web-sites and in web-applications. All icon sets are free. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the icons — the license can change from time to time. The icons provided below may turn out to be useful and helpful in corporate designs, portfolios, blogs, magazines and in Web-applications. Please feel free to suggest more icon sets in the comments to this post.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the brand new Smashing Book?]

Web Application Icon Sets

Chalkwork HTML Royalty-free Icons
Chalkwork HTML is a free set of HTML-themed icons, designed to perfectly complement all other sets in the Chalkwork Family. Featuring 31 graphical representations of common markup elements, this is a completely free icon set available for personal and commercial projects alike (although the usual Chalkwork license terms still apply). The set is available in 3 sizes and 6 file formats: transparent PNG, TIF, GIF, BMP, Windows ICO, and Mac ICNS.

Hand Pointer Icons
Free icon set that includes 36 hand pointer icons of 6 diferent types with 6 color variants. Icon set also includes .psd source file.

MinIcons

Flavour Extended: The Ultimate Icon Set For Web Designers
A couple of months ago we released the beautiful Flavours Icon set that was designed by Oliver Twardowski, a graphic designer from Bonn, Germany, the set aimed to help designers in their Web and user interface designs, containing 177 icons in a resolution of 48×48 pixels. In this post we release the updated version of the icon set, now with 452 icons, freely available to use in private or commercial projects.

Basic Set
42 high quality icons in 64×64, 32×32 and 16×16 sizes. Mac OS, Win and .PNG-formats.

Web Injection
This Free Icon Pack is for use in your personal and commercial projects, and can be used without attribution. It may not be redistributed. The set includes 26 stylish icons designed by Midtone Design Studio. Each icon is a .png at 48×48px. The Icons were tediously hand crafted by designer Jonatan Castro Fernández.

File Status Icons
File Status Icons set includes 16 icons that can be used for web-applications that deploy Subversion-based projects.

2experts Icons Set
These icons are created from scratch using Adobe Fireworks. The zipped pack contains 48×48 PNG images, which you can use for free.

Danish Royalty Free
Designed by Jonas Rask.

Onebit Icons Set
80 beautiful icons in the resolution 48×48px, .png. Download part 1, too.

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.

The Browser Icons
This set contains 9 web browser icons available in 64×64, 32×32 and 16×16 pixels. Includes major browsers like Mozilla Firefox,Internet Explorer, Opera,Google Chrome and more.

Sketchy icons

Milky Icons Set
The Milky set contains more than 131 icons primarily colored in green, giving an eye-pleasant look and prominent display on either dark or bright backgrounds. After eight times of releasing the icons seperately as each part at Min Tran’s weblog, designed mostly at request by our users or readers, now we gathered and packed them all into one package, conveniently for you to get all the icons at the same time.

Media Icons
This icons set contains 15 simple icons in PNG (128×128px), for Windows and Mac.

Absque

Silk Companion 1 (more Silk icons)
Mark James (FamFamFam) created a great set of 1,022 silky-smooth 16×16 true-colour icons in PNG format, aptly named Silk Icons. This set is based upon the Silk set and presents 460+ more icons that are derivations and recompositions of the original set.

Coquette 4 Icons Set
The forth part of the Coquette free icons set is powered by another 50 new icons. This playful free icon set contains curvy and colorful free icons made with one goal, to get all the affection and playfulness to your projects. “Coquette” free icon set contains 50 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.

Coquette 5 Icons Set
The fifth part of the “Coquette” icon set contains 50 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.

E-Commerce Icon Sets

Chalkwork Payments (Free) Icons
Chalkwork Payments is a free set of online payments icons, designed to perfectly complement all other sets in the Chalkwork Family. Featuring 21 base icons and 105 variations, these graphical representations of common payment services and payment-related imagery are a completely free icon set available for personal and commercial projects alike (although the usual Chalkwork license terms still apply). Chalkwork Payments is available in 3 sizes and 6 file formats: transparent PNG, TIF, GIF, BMP, Windows ICO, and Mac ICNS.

Finance Icons Set
The icons are free for personal use and also free for commercial use, but the designers require linking to their web site. The archive contains the icons in all sizes, Windows, Mac and PNG formats.

Credit Cards Icons
23 free credit card icons for free download. More free credit card icons.

Business Icons

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.

Useful Icon Sets

Free Multimedia Vector Icons
A set of free multimedia vector icons in various colors and button styles. These are already vectors and not some ordinary transparent PNG anymore so you can easily modify them to your heart’s desire. I’m thinking of doing some vector social network icons next time but I’m still figuring out a concept. I know there are a lot of these kind of icons scattered around but I’d like to do something different. We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy these vector icons. These icons come in two vector file formats, EPS (Illustrator 10 up) and AI (Illustrator CS up).

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

172 final country flag icons
172 final country flag icons. 48×48 png.

Symbol Signs
The complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian symbols developed by AIGA is now available on the web, free of charge. Signs are available in EPS and GIF formats.

Free Vector Icons Pack 03
Vector template.

Social Icon Sets

Social Media Mini Iconpack
This icon set consists of 30 (16×16) finely crafted social media icons. They are free to use non-commercially. Put them on your blog or on your website to help users bookmark or share your site socially. I hear its all-the-rage these days. This icon pack consists of the following icons, in absolutely no logical order:

Icons Cloud
Social icon set with icons shaped cloud. PNG.

Page Peel
The set contains 16 social icons in (transparent) PNG format.

Free Vector Icons Set + Twitter Birdy Icon

Handycons 2 – another free hand drawn icon set
This icons set contains Facebook, Blinklist, Feedburner, Flickr, FriendFeed, Furl, Gmail, Google, Heart icon, Last FM, Linked IN, Magnolia, Newsvine, PayPal, Skype, Sphinn, Twitter, Vimeo, Yahoo and You Tube icons. All icons come in four sizes: 16×16, 32×32, 64×64 and 12×128px. And they are all free.

19 Free Hand-Dran Sketch Icons
Each icon is a .JPG and comes in two sizes: 48×48px and 96×96px. Each is dark greyish on a white background.

Polaroid icon set
YouTube, Delicious, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, mySpace, Feedburner, Skype, Yahoo, Last.fm, Linkin, Reddit and Gmail.

IconTexto Web 2.0 User
28 icons in formats PNG (256×256, 128×128, 48×48, 32×32, 16×16), ICO (256×256, 128×128, 48×48, 32×32, 16×16) and ICNS (256×256, 128×128, 48×48, 32×32, 16×16).

Social Icons Hand-Drawn
This set includes icons for Blip.fm, Digg, Facebook, Firefox, Flickr, Meneame, Myspace, Technorati, Twitter, Vimeo, Wordpress, Youtube, LastFM, RSS, Blogger, GMail, Reddit and StumbleUpon. The icons are available in the sizes 24×24, 32×32, 48×48 and 64×64. Released under Creative Commons license.

Circular Social Icons
The zip file includes 3 sizes for 17 icons: 128×128px, 64×64px and 32×32px. There is an icon for the following: Blogger, Delicious, DesignFloat, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Google, a heart icon that will work for anything (such as bookmark), MySpace, Reddit, an RSS icon, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo! and YouTube. Designed by Eli Burford from Australia.

Beautiful General Icon Sets

Manila Mail
A manila envelope style mail replacement.

Baggy Icon Set
Baggy Icon Set was designed by Paul Kadysz. It contains 5 high quality icns. This time we’ve got 3 different formats (.ico, .icns and .png) and 6 sizes! 512px-16px (except .png). Here’s how the set looks like.

Dox
The set contains 47 ICNS in iCONTAINER format.

Agua Icons Set
350 free beautiful desktop icons that can also be used online. Designed by the master David Lanham.

30 free office Icons
30 free office icons which rendered at 256×256, 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 16×16 pixels and formats are png, ico and icns.

Project Icon Set For Free Download
This icon set, designed by Navdeep Raj and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers, contains 18 beautiful icons related to project management. The set includes the icons address card, bar graph, calendar, clock / time, conference device, contact, documents, draft, mail, marker, milestone, notes, portfolio, project plan / gant chart, search / find, sitemap / flowchart, todo and user / resource. The files are transparent PNGs, and vector Fireworks source files are included as well. As always, the set is completely free and may be used for any private or commercial project without any restrictions whatsoever.

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.

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.

DI – Folder Icons

Weby Icon Set
The icons are available in PNG, ICO and ICNS format. They are free to use for both personal and commercial projects, including websites, templates & software. You are not allowed to sell or redistribute the icons anywhere else. If you like to share the icons please link to this article.

Sleek XP Basic Icons
50 stock icon in PNG and ICO formats. this is absolutely free for personal and non-commercial purposes only.

40 Free Twitter Badges
The set includes 40 files in total, all in transparent .png format. The buttons etc come with PSD files too so you can edit and re-size them as needed. The original characters come as a large High Res image which makes it very easy to scale down and use however you want.

Puzzle Icons
A small tribute to Erno Rubik and Uwe Meffert, Mac OS X Style!

Design a Stylish Mail Icon in Photoshop

Round Theme Icons

Iiro Jappinen’s Icons
For personal use only.

Niepce’s Camera Obscura
The download package now includes 7 icons as an iContainer and for Mac (icns, Folder), Linux (PNG) and Windows (ico) and you can grab it from the Goodies page.

Mod

Archigraphs

Cute Critters Free Icon Pack
The Cute Critters Icon Pack is a free Icon set with 13 painfully cute critters, created by Elio Rivero of ilovecolors. Each icon is in .png format sized at 512×512px with transparent backgrounds. Altogether, there is more cuteness than you could shake a stick at. This Free Icon Pack is for use in your personal and commercial projects, and can be used without attribution. It may not be redistributed.

Blog Icons

Somatic Rebirth Apps Icons – Life in Colors

Sticker Icons
152 various beautiful icons designed by David Lanham.

Star Trek Icons
Official Star Trek icons and desktop pictures for free download.