Designers everywhere are trying to spice up their designs and communicate to end-users better using icons, and while there are many high quality, free for commercial use icons, finding them could be very difficult. I remember the times when I was browsing through dozens of blogs and websites trying to find icons, and when I did, quickly save them to disk. Well, keeping track of all my icons turned out to be more difficult than I expected as the number of collections increased. But, a few months ago, I stumbled upon an interesting icon search engine – iconfinder.net. Well, it’s not a fully fledged, google-like search engine, it’s more of a icon repository, were iconsets are uploaded and tagged, so that it’s easier to find. A couple of weeks ago, a new icon search engine has been released, findicons.com, with similar capabilities as the one mentioned before. In this post I’ll try and compare them side-by-side; I’ll be reviewing search features, save-as features, API, tagging, and ease of use.
Iconfinder.net
Let me start with iconfinder, since this one was the first to emerge. It was quite a pleasant surprise for me when I discovered Iconfinder. Search capabilities include searching by name/tag, finding specific iconsets, or even icons inside an iconset. Refining search results is done by using a slider to select the size range (from 0 to 128 px) and a license filter. You can even apply white, transparent or black as background color to the icons, so you can check, before downloading, if the icon you found might match your design. It even shows related searches, based on the tags assigned to the icon. You can contribute to the search results by adding or deleting assigned tags. Submitting icons is easy as well – through a webform, intended for webdesigners, or a bookmarklet, so you can share any website that has nice icons. The REST API is useful, especially for designing you custom search tool – there was also a Firefox search engine add-on for Iconfinder.net, but unfortunately I can’t find it anymore. The API produces results in both XML and JSON format. There are currently 156,469 icons available in 484 icon sets, and the number increases every day.
Findicons.com
Findicons has more or less the same features as Iconfinder. What adds extra, compared to the previous one, is the user space capability. The most important feature a user account brings you is the ability to add icons to favorites, a feature that I really miss when using Iconfinder.net. Also, comparing search filters, on findicons.com you can filter icons by colors, style (3d, glassy or hand drawn) or license, and sort the results by relevancy. Also, a powerful feature is the Convert icon, which support bmp, eps, gif, jpeg, psd, svg, tga or tiff formats, adding to the existing ico, icns and png formats, though saving the icon in png format could easily be the most used. The icon details page allows you to quickly save the icon in other available sizes, edit tags and even suggests similar icons. The API is not yet launched (at the time of this post being written), but the team behind this project announces this feature as “under construction” (currently in testing).
Conclusions
Overall, the two projects are powerful tools for the designers, containing a huge library of icons, easily browseable and searchable. I would loved more to see Findicons.com presenting a more different layout – it looks too much like an IconFinder clone, but the advanced search filters and user account make it a valuable resource. If you haven’t already started using any of these tools, I recommend you do.
