Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
SVGmix is a massive collection of free SVG icons and brand logos (svgmix.com)
108 points by tinhat on July 16, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments


Serious problem with this collection: Many of their icons require attribution, and they do not offer enough detail about the licenses to credit the authors.

For example, this baseball icon:

https://svgmix.com/item/yBq8JY/ball-baseball

says that it is licensed under the "MIT License". That means that, if you embed the icon in a product, you're obligated to document the fact that the icon is copyrighted by its author and explain what license you used it under.

The link they offer for the license is this one: https://opensource.org/license/mit/

It just says "Copyright <copyright holder>"... they don't offer you any way to identify the actual copyright holder and credit them according to the license they claim for the icon.

That's bad. To the point of making it nearly impossible to reuse these freely offered icons.


They also don’t seem to share the provenance of their icons and the “About us” page takes you to the icon list. Very concerning from a licensing perspective.


A good related source is Icônes [1][2], an icon explorer that even has a VS extension.

[1] https://icones.js.org/ [2] https://github.com/antfu/icones


Another worthy mention, SuperTinyIcons:

https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons


https://brandfetch.com/ is another great resource for brand logos they even have a Brand API to programmatically get access to this data. See demo

https://brandfetch.com/developers/demo


Does anyone know any good underrated educational resources for more "specialized" icon design?

I have a big bone to pick with these types of sites. Everything has developed this homogenized feel. Even with the slight variations in every set of SVG icons on that website, they all look the same kind of, and the idiosyncratic "fingerprint" so to speak of a specific kind of set has been erased in place of this constantly never-ending minimal style.

Don't get me wrong, these things are useful if you wanna get up and running and don't care about design being optimal, but if you want your website to have its own "character", more energy needs to be invested.


Currently† Slashdoted, so a mirror:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20230716142310/https://svgmix.co...

    Sun 16 Jul 2023 11:11:16 EDT
    Sun 16 Jul 2023 15:11:16 UTC


Are there any free icon sites with licenses that don't requite attribution?


SVGmix seems to include different icon packs with different licenses. Have you looked if they have any with a license that fits your need?

For the corporate logo stuff, I don't think you can use any of that at any point. It seems fishy to use trademarked logos of private corporations without their explicit consent.


Why is that a bother? Just put the attributions in the part of the site with all of your legalese nobody reads.


I believe most SVG icon license require attribution to be on all pages that the icon appear in, not just the legalese page.


Ah, so are there any sites that don’t require ridiculous attribution? ;-)


If you're going to be using work that someone else did, free of charge, the least you can do is agree to their attribution requirements. If not, you're more than free to go and design your own icons. Or can you go and pay someone to design icons.

Complaining about "ridiculous" licenses that people put on their free stuff, seems pretty rude to me.


there's different applications of these icons, and if you're not willing to recognize that, then don't come at me about free use blah blah blah credit.

if i'm wanting to use icons like Fontawesome or some such that are part of the UI that function as buttons or whatnot and something much more than just there to be pretty, expecting an attribution byline under everyone is just never going to work in the sense of a UI. if you're an icon maker, surely, this is understandable. Fontawesome doesn't require the attribution per use or per page[0]. So it is totally doable with out sounding like some self righteous know it all on the interwebs. Now, if you're using a giant icon as the focal piece of the art on your page, then the layout does absolutely allow for immediate attribution of the graphic just like photos.

[0] https://fontawesome.com/license/free


You're always free not to use them, and then no attribution is required. I don't understand where this apparent sense of entitlement is coming from? Do you not agree that people are free to license their work however they please? Do you think that you should just be able to use anything anyone makes without paying the authors any heed?


Please, go back and re-read this thread. I never said use without attribution. Take a breath and step off your soap box for just a minute. To recap, my original comment was in support of a reasonable attribution. Then someone else came out with an unreasonable attribution request on every single use of an icon. This led me to jokingly reiterating the original question I responded to with a request for reasonable examples. Then you came at me like I'm asking for free use without credit whatsoever. When in fact, I actually provided an example of something I think of a reasonable license. Not once, ever, have I suggested use for free and fuck a license. You want this argument so bad, you injected that into the conversation.


People are free to do as they like, including complain about unrealistic licenses.


The Noun Project has a $10/yr membership that lets you skip attribution (permanently, not just while you are a paying member).


Do you have a link or discount code or something for a $10/year sub? Looking on their site a yearly sub is $40 not 10.


Sorry; I posted with old info without checking if the situation had since changed.





Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: