Free Icons and Online Icon Generator Tools

Need some icons for your (web) app but have nobody with Mad Photoshop Skills™ at hand? These three sites will help you:

Iconfinder.net

My first icon resource on the web is www.iconfinder.net. It is a very large database of icons and icon sets in various formats and sizes. They are licensed differently, so not all sets are free but even for free commercial use there are plenty. And you can filter by license.

Iconfinder.com Icon Download Database

ICONSDB.com Icon Customizer

Icons DB has thousands of completely free, monochromatic customizable icons. If you need some quick simple flat icons you probably find them here. The clou: you can chose to download all of them in any color and any size as ICO, PNG, GIF, JPG or ICNS

Iconsdb.com Online Icon Generator

Iconizer.net Icon Generator

Iconizer is a big icon database very similar to iconfinder but adds icon customization on top. So even complex multicolor icons can be changed almost arbitrarily in color and size.

Iconizer.net Icon Generator

Another tip:

Choose your icons carefully to be easily recognized by most if not all of your target audience. Even widespread icons like chains for “link” only seem to be natural for geeks like us but are not for your average Joe.

I recommend this article as food for thought: http://stiern.com/articles/usability/usability-in-icons/

Color Palette Tools (not only) for Casual Designers

Who needs to create a simple design from time to time without having too much knowledge about things like color theory, does not need to put his foot into his mouth with the colors. Here are three ressources for harmonic color palettes:

1. Paletton

Simply click and drag the points in the color wheel with your mouse and get a matching palette in real time, including a preview how the colors look like on a website. Presets for lightness and saturation like “Pastel”, “Shiny” oder “Dark” are useful as starting points.

Link: http://paletton.com

Paletton.com Screenshot

2. Colour Lovers

A different approach: Here designers provide color palettes as well as patterns and single colors. You can search palettes by theme, rate and comment them. Chooese from millions of hand crafted palettes!

Link: http://www.colourlovers.com/

COLOURlovers Screenshot

3. Hex Color Tool

For monochromatic palettes the hex color tool suffices. Start with one color, choose the step size to lighten/darken, done. You can experiment with the inputs without losing previous results.

Link: http://hexcolortool.com/

Hex Color Tool Screenshot

$color = rand(0x000000,0xffffff); is out! Even the simplest website should not lack a harmonic color scheme. Continue reading “Color Palette Tools (not only) for Casual Designers”