Free icons for use in your projects

Today, I wanted to share a few great places where you can find free icons to use on your projects.

When possible, I prefer to get all of my icons for a project from one source so that they have a similar aesthetic in terms of line weight, stylistic approach, and so on. As a result, my suggestions are all bigger libraries with many icons and options.

• Tabler Icons is a set of 558 MIT licensed SVG icons. This site has the absolute best UI of any of the ones I’ve seen. Click on an icon and the SVG HTML is automatically copied to your clipboard for pasting into a project.
• Feather Icons is a collection of 228 icons, also MIT licensed and also in SVG format. Clicking on an icon automatically downloads it.
• IcoMoon is one of the original icon sets. They used to offer an icon font back when those were cool. Today, they offer free and paid icon sets with many different styles, weights, and more. This is my personal favorite source of icons.

If none of these have icons I need—particularly if I’m looking for something more illustrative like a kraken or pirate ship or something—I really like The Noun Project.

You can download icons for free to try them out, and buy a license once you find one that’s a good fit. Once you find one you like, pay for proper rights to it. Don’t be a jerk.

Also, if you’re using an icon as part of a UI label, don’t forget to provide proper accessible text labels for screen reader users.