Ikonate – fully customisable and accessible vector icons

https://www.ikonate.com

by docuru • 7 years ago

416 53 7 years ago

dlbucci• 7 years ago

Really cool! I kinda wish I had thought of it :) Any thoughts to adding further parameterization to icons? Like altering the length of the handle of the magnifying glass or something?

docuru2• 7 years ago

Hey, I share the project but I'm not the author, I just think it's pretty cool too

mkl• 7 years ago

"Do not resell or redistribute the icons, even for free." But they gave them the MIT License, which explicitly allows those things...

stephenr• 7 years ago

This is just bizarre. Picking “MIT” because it sounds cool?

I cannot understand how the authors think this is valid.

onion2k• 7 years ago

The author actually picked the Apache license but changed it to MIT a year ago[1].

I imagine the author is trying to do open source well by using a license but doesn't fully understand the impact it has on the project. That's fair enough, and very common when people are new to open source.

[1] https://github.com/mikolajdobrucki/ikonate/commit/5993f43ce6...

giornogiovanna• 7 years ago

Yeah, I think they'd be better served by something like `CC BY-ND 4.0`.

bjelkeman-again• 7 years ago

Thanks to the person who added this as an issue on the repo. I was going to do it, but it was already done.

mikolajdobrucki5• 7 years ago

You're right, this didn't make any sense. I updated the README accordingly. Sorry for the confusion!

ivanhoe• 7 years ago

You also have a little typo in README, under License: "Attribution IN much appreciated", instead of IS

HenryBemis2• 7 years ago

Great work, and I will probably be using your icons on my app. Is there a Paypal 'donate' button (that I cannot find)?

akadeb• 7 years ago

Seems to have been updated: https://github.com/mikolajdobrucki/ikonate/commit/e34fa97dd8...

tribby• 7 years ago

Ikonate is the very first icon set of this kind designed to be fully accessible*
* Ikonate is NOT accessible out of the box and will never be. We've done our best to follow the best accessibility practices while building this software, but it's your role to adjust it and make it truly accessible inside your project.

these are incompatible statements. the author should just not call it accessible.

also -- why "will never be"? there are ways to make it more accessible, if not perfect. one idea: turn the icons into a truetype GX variable font with a weight axis that increases as viewport size decreases using media queries. that would increase out of the box legibility considerably.

Nadya2• 7 years ago

I handle ADA issues at work and deal with updating sites to adhere to WCAG 2.0. So perhaps I can offer my $0.02 and clear this up.

It is actually impossible for anything to be accessible out-of-the-box, but they have been designed to be accessible and have sane defaults. Those statements do not contradict one another.

For example, if you use a magnifying glass icon to mean "zoom" but their default title text for a magnifying glass is "search" then it is not out-of-the-box accessible even though it was designed to be fully accessible. They even mention this scenario (generically, not specifically) in their disclaimer.

E.g. all the titles and descriptions given to the icons should be treated as placeholders and changed in implementation depending on an actual role of each icon. In many cases, you may not need them altogether

Having the placeholders there is questionably good - it would be better to have the attributes there but blank in my opinion. It will do more harm than good being wrong than being blank, but that's a difference in preference for implementation.

mikolajdobrucki5• 7 years ago

You're right that placeholder may do more harm than good and it's questionable if it makes any sense. Still considered it a better option though at that point

docuru2• 7 years ago

Thanks for all the feedback, I tweeted the author about HN link, and someone has created a thread on GitHub. Hopefully, it will help him clear things up about the license. I believe it is not his intention to confuse us. Anyway, it is a cool tool and big thumbs up for the author!

mikolajdobrucki5• 7 years ago

Thanks a lot for the heads up! It's fixed, I already updated the README. Sorry for the confusion caused.

jlg232• 7 years ago

I only checked a few raw icons and I am impressed: They are fully stripped of superfluous markup introduced by SVG editors; that was something which I had to implement over and over again for customers' build pipelines.

Also, the possibility to download a custom styled set is great: With all other icon sets I ended up either modifying them myself in a text editor or received a bunch of modified files from the graphics person in the project - but bloated with markup I needed to strip afterwards (see first point).

scotth• 7 years ago

Are you familiar with svgo?

jlg232• 7 years ago

Yes, but my clients usually don't want to add node to their infrastructure (I do CL) and, after all, the basic cleaning of SVGs is simple: Filter XML with a whitelist of namespaces.

hgasimov2• 7 years ago

Oh, wow. Thanks a lot to the owner of this web site.

hgasimov2• 7 years ago

Obviously very nice looking icons. It would be even better to be able to download them as font. Then one can customise the icons later on his/her own website using CSS (text-color, background-colour, font-size, etc).

billfruit3• 7 years ago

I can't find a link to it, but I remember reading a discussion, that if you want icons/images for fixes known sizes and resolutions, it is better to have rasters than vectors: I think, mostly to do with scaling of line weights/widths, vector scaling of these often results in ungainly images while a raster of a given native resolution looks clearer/better more proportionate.

sjwright• 7 years ago

To the extent that might have ever been true, it would have been because of the limitations of very low resolution displays, or to work around limitations in the vector rasterizer.

In any modern context, a vector is always preferable as it will generate the best output for an unlimited number of sizes, resolutions and contexts.

billfruit3• 7 years ago

The question may have been the scaling of line widths in a linear fashion while using vector images, which isn't that pleasing to the eye, compared to a hand crafted raster with more eye pleasing line width for a give size/resolution. May for aesthetic reasons line widths may require to be scaling in a nonlinear way?

Scaled vectors will have mathematically correct line widths, but to a human perception the line may appear to thick/thin for the image size, than which a raster artist would have used if they were creating a native raster of that size.

wodenokoto• 7 years ago

Kinda related: It seems clipart died with Google image search and the only alternatives I can find are things like the noun project[1] or fontawesome[2] both of which require a subscription, rather than a purchase, and neither really fills that clip art use-case.

I'd love to purchase a clipart set like in the old 90's days of power point.

[1] https://thenounproject.com/accounts/pricing/

[2] https://fontawesome.com/pro

Ibethewalrus• 7 years ago

Images: istockphoto Adobe stock

Icon sets:

Icomoon

Streamline icons

Iconfinder

Icons8

sabizmil• 7 years ago

There's also https://www.flaticon.com

baxtr• 7 years ago

I played around with it and have to say that this is just great. The only option that I did not understand since it didn't change anything was the "style" button. What is that for?

illuminati1911• 7 years ago

Rounding (or not) the edges/corners of the objects within the icon.

ltc5505• 7 years ago

Did the button work for you? It didn't for me.

Elect2• 7 years ago

off-topic question: what library the site is using for these icons: https://imgur.com/a/GVVi3TQ , I really like 3d icons.

highesttide• 7 years ago

Those look like standard OS font emoji

tornadon• 7 years ago

More specifically the ones in that screenshot look like the versions you’d find on iOS/macOS. Just thought I’d mention it in case someone was viewing it with say an Android device it would look different [1].

[1] https://emojipedia.org/hammer-and-pick/

8lall0• 7 years ago

Nice job! The spritesheet is the best!

shemeroni• 7 years ago

Pretty cool. Will use it in my projects for sure. Thanks mikolajdobrucki :)

pzo• 7 years ago

Nice collection. Would be nice to easily create icon with just any text similar to already included HDR icon to accommodate e.g. ISO, WB, I/O, HD etc

arusahni• 7 years ago

There's a certain irony in having the link to the accessibility disclaimer be so hard to target.

kowdermeister• 7 years ago

This is pretty neat, cool name, it goes to my loved bookmarks :)

One thing though I don't get is the 0 border width setting. Is that useful somehow?

Hendrikto• 7 years ago

Afaik, its a workaround for IE.

aasasd• 7 years ago

Note that there's a vaguely popular site named ‘icons8’ on about the same topic, so some confusion might ensue in the future.

HenryBemis2• 7 years ago

Heh, I wonder if Mikolaj will respond to this comment. I don't think it's a coincidence. Some spill-off traffic never hurts. Although the icon8 owner may frown upon this.

mezod2• 7 years ago

what would be the most reasonable way to "fill" these icons?

nacs• 7 years ago

You'd have to do that manually with Adobe Illustrator/Sketch/Affinity Designer or some similar vector editing software.

The Github has the raw SVGs you can download and edit.

mezod2• 7 years ago

Thanks!

Ikonate – fully customisable and accessible vector icons

Related Stories