They probably have >90% of all the logos contained on simpleicons, along with nearly any other icon you could ever want or need.
Simple Icons is an icon pack on Iconify
Don't tell the guy who paid $70k for icons about this!
The guy who paid $70k to convert 14000 existing icons/logos to SVG for commercial use because he wanted to use these icons according to his product standards. All existing SVGs icons are for personal and study purposes, that's why he spent so much amount out of good faith, moral compliance and professional courtesy.
Moreover, this website has 3198 icons and what about the remaining icons as per his specifications?
One very important thing to note here is that these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License meaning you must allow users to download the source code no matter whether it's modified or not.
> these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License
Another important point is that licenses like AGPL are (simplifying slightly) copyright instruments, and for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be creative effort, which I expect not to be the case for at least the vast majority of the icons—they’ll be mechanical translations, more or less. The original creators will hold copyright over the designs, but I don’t believe there will be any further copyright on such an icon collection, just as photographs of public domain artwork don’t get copyright protection. I am conscientious about these details, and I’d be comfortable ignoring an AGPL claim on such a thing.
Also AGPL would not be a good license for a work like this. The GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code, and quite a bit of their terms are a little difficult to apply for such a collection as this. And their nature would largely prevent anyone from using the icons unless they wanted to license their stuff under (simplifying slightly) the same license.
can svg even be "not open source"?
SVG the standard, no. SVG icons, absolutely. In the same way Python is open source, but I can write software using Python that is not open source.
But if you use it on the web, it becomes "open-source" - not by license, but for all practical purposes. Or am I wrong?
The key to open source is the ability to modify it effectively.
> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.
For icons like this, it’s just that there is no object code, the source code is the only form there is.
But supposing you had your SVG document with high precision, meaningful object IDs, Inkscape PowerStroke data (variable stroke thickness, which gets materialised in SVG as a path that gets fill), editor metadata and the likes, and then fed it through svgo and stripped all that stuff out, leaving just the bare bones, the original would be the source code, and the svg output object code.
To put it in the frame of another format where the difference is more stark, if you design something in Photoshop and you export it as PNG but don’t distribute the PSD, that ain’t Open Source. You can modify it, but not properly.
Or another: C, and a compiled binary. You can patch the binary, but that doesn’t make everything open source.
Having the source code available is not open source nor free software.
Open source is a category of licenses.
What you mean is that it is plaintext, and can be introspected. Great for many practical purposes, yes, but in business context, you are obligated to honor the actual license.
maybe if those SVGs are only used as assets inside an iOS/Android app but not on a webpage accessible via browser ....
If you find a GitHub repository with code inside it and no LICENSE file (or any other license specifier), it is not open source.
And don't tell them about the browser inspector nor how to copy SVG code using that
I didn't want to tell you, but there is a thing called copyright. That said, if you copy SVG it is often easy to change the paths etc. and make it "yours".
I guess I'd rather pay a small bit though.
> a thing called copyright
All the chatbot corps out there: And I took that personally.
What is the story? URL to read? (Search resulted in another CEO's $70K salary thing.)
Is this like Pepsi’s Million Dollar logo redesign?
$5.00/image. The math on that is absurd unless the artist is cranking what, 20 images an hour?
Feels like they thought they had an edge, probably an LLM, and it didn’t work out.
Also feels like it took $70k to generate 14,000 requirements, or the SOW is actually shit and this is all a disaster.
Disclaimer: I don’t read twitter, if all this was spelled out in the link I apologize
If you already starting from an existing set from publicly available sources, and you just need to standardize them amongst each other for consistency, then I can see how that would be kinda reasonable, though I'm no designer myself
perhaps things like giving them a consistent center or consistent brightness/contrast could be done programmatically as well, and maybe there are end user tools to do those things en masse
other tweaks such as selecting between subtle variations found in each icon, or adding some artistic modification, shadow mimicking, etc... can possibly be done, to align the set to a certain pre-defined theme now that I think about it more
seems like a pretty interesting kinda project actually
> Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation ~Baha'u'llah
the designer who chose to instead run with the money probably got insecure or bored, but they would probably be happier if they learned to appreciate the creative process more
So what, he was asking the designer to re-create already existing icons? Or brand new icons for each stock?
Thats insanely fucked up either way of the designer leading them on like that or to ultimately cheat someone
Re-create existing icons, since a lot of these icon packs are not very standardized (e.g. some icons are full logos, some are actual icons, some have borders, some have backgrounds, etc).
Seems like a lot of trademark infringement suits about to come their way. Am I mistaken or is there no way this viable? In addition, nobody has any legal right to put others trademarks (use these) on anything without the trademark owners permission. So even if the site and distribution is somehow OK, nobody can really use them anyway. Right?
You're mostly fine unless you are confusing consumers. The purpose of these marks is exactly to avoid that, so you're going to get into a lot of trouble if you use the marks to mislead people in any way.
Take the Air China logo - if a not-so-bright reader might think you are Air China, you're using this all wrong. But if you use an Air China logo to signify the routes actually flown by Air China on a free world map of international flights on your web site, well, yeah, that's Air China, nobody is misled, even a moron knows the little logos on your map of the world aren't actually jet aeroplanes.
I'm not sure if simply offering a brand's logo would be trademark infringement.
Years ago someone contacted me at the company I worked for claiming in some sorta pseudo legal language that we couldn't have one of our competitor's logos on our website. We had it on a promotional page comparing features across similar products.
Turns out we can do that in the US.
It's not trademark infringement to copy or display a logo. Trademark infringement happens when you confuse customers by using a logo or phrase and make them think that you're selling the actual product or that you're somehow endorsed by the original company.
I always assumed Font Awesome had some business agreement with those orgs eventually as font awesome did charge for some of their icons IIRC.
Having said that, I'm not sure even that is legally necessary.
I imagine avoiding IP legal issues with things like icons could be less about signing agreements with all involved companies and more about having a team that can respond professionally to an inquiry.
Businesses may often not really understand what’s going on and default to being worried about third-party use of their trademarks that they normally must defend. Perhaps they don’t need to worry in this case, where it may actually provide a bit of free advertisement, but if there’s no one on the other side then it wouldn’t help the case.
IANAL
These and others have been online for a while, so I doubt it. There's more here, under the Brands / Social category: https://icones.js.org/
Yes, there are ways someone could use them that would not only run afoul of the trademark, but have trademark holders come after them. However, that doesn't make this useless, because there are proper and gray-area uses of these as well.
They probably each carry their own licensing and terms of use. I'd suspect there's a good number where reuse in some situations would be permitted, and in others would not. But every single one is going to be different, and just making assumptions is a quick way to blindly assume enormous legal liability.
That's why SimpleIcons contains metadata about that, so if you are worried about that, you can just exclude any icons that have explicit licensing information attached.
I assume most brands are happy to see their icons being used/shared on as many platforms as possible. It's just free advertisment.
If someone uses them in a context that's actually problematic for the brand, the brand can still sue them then. But that won't be the common case.
Don’t tell every SaaS company ever. (Who I doubt all have robust legal processes for including logos on their homepages)
If you see the official logo it has different colors than the one provided in the website, so you can't that for production use cases.
Supplying the assets is not a problem. Most stock art orgs have brands. I suspect that they can get into "gray areas," if they charge for it.
Using them is the problematic part.
Isn't it also copyright infringement, and thus punishable by death in some enlightened jurisdictions [1], or at least by thousands in damages per infringement?
How many infringements do you generate by just loading the front page?
[1] Those most exposed to Hollywood lobbying.
It has existed for years and they actively remove icons when they get a takedown request. I'm sure most companies other than Oracle are happy to be there.
If you are going to use them somewhere in your online product/project, kindly check the License agreement first.
Also check the DISCLAIMER, which seems to be overriding the License:
Or just draw googly eyes on top and its a parody and totally legal art..
You can also have a NN turn it into a prompt and then recreate the SVG from prompt - shove it through the laundryAImat - nothing is sacred, the world they wanted they have now, let them suffer speared on there own swords.
I find it amusing because in the past, I would have used this to find the logo of the company that I'd work for at the time.
I wonder how many employees of said brands will use this rather than their corporate environment to find an svg asset!
I’ve done this. The internal brand center was focused mostly on sales and people interfacing with customers.
I was using it for internal tools though. I’m sure if I made customer facing sites I would need to go through more official channels and make sure all the branding guidelines are followed to the letter.
I had to convert and edit .ai files to get commonly used versions of our logo.
Wish they'd make an SVG for my business! Hah
I use these for everything, I've even corrected a couple of them as sites tend to tweak their logos all the time:
Oh that's great, I'm always looking for logos for apps
Is this sarcasm? This seems like an uncommon thing to want.
I did not expect to see AEW (All Elite Wrestling) on the list.
Automatic like for including Beekeeper Studio :-D.
Doesn't have pornhub or Brazzers, not even logo SVG archiving escapes the tentacles of the moral police (keep in mind pornhub it's one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world)
Also no Microsoft logos (top two biggest companies in the world). The moral police are out of control! /s
Microsoft legal requested they remove their logos.
Except I actually looked for the other top 10 most popular websites before making my comment, they are all there (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al), as you may know Microsoft.com doesn't even make it to the top 100
Shameless self promotion: I build a logo search engine that currently has almost 500K logos indexed: https://logosear.ch/
Also, a good source of official SVG logos is BIMI, a standard that uses DNS to point to the URL of an SVG.
Spec: https://bimigroup.org/
I recently scraped them for the top N domains: https://bimi-explorer.svg.zone/bimi/
Well done!
A couple of points.
It would be great if it listed the file format and size on the results page, so I dont have to click on every logo to find that informatino out.
How does this differ from doing a google image search of "$BRAND logo"?
As an alternative, I run SuperTinyIcons. They're all full colour and each icon is guaranteed to be under 1KB.
https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons
Very nice, nice set of constraints!
I just don't see the need for sites like this, given that Iconify exists: https://icon-sets.iconify.design
They probably have >90% of all the logos contained on simpleicons, along with nearly any other icon you could ever want or need.
Simple Icons is an icon pack on Iconify
Don't tell the guy who paid $70k for icons about this!
The guy who paid $70k to convert 14000 existing icons/logos to SVG for commercial use because he wanted to use these icons according to his product standards. All existing SVGs icons are for personal and study purposes, that's why he spent so much amount out of good faith, moral compliance and professional courtesy.
Moreover, this website has 3198 icons and what about the remaining icons as per his specifications?
One very important thing to note here is that these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License meaning you must allow users to download the source code no matter whether it's modified or not.
> these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License
The only information I can find for this collection is CC-0 <https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/develop/LI...>.
Another important point is that licenses like AGPL are (simplifying slightly) copyright instruments, and for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be creative effort, which I expect not to be the case for at least the vast majority of the icons—they’ll be mechanical translations, more or less. The original creators will hold copyright over the designs, but I don’t believe there will be any further copyright on such an icon collection, just as photographs of public domain artwork don’t get copyright protection. I am conscientious about these details, and I’d be comfortable ignoring an AGPL claim on such a thing.
Also AGPL would not be a good license for a work like this. The GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code, and quite a bit of their terms are a little difficult to apply for such a collection as this. And their nature would largely prevent anyone from using the icons unless they wanted to license their stuff under (simplifying slightly) the same license.
can svg even be "not open source"?
SVG the standard, no. SVG icons, absolutely. In the same way Python is open source, but I can write software using Python that is not open source.
But if you use it on the web, it becomes "open-source" - not by license, but for all practical purposes. Or am I wrong?
The key to open source is the ability to modify it effectively.
To use GPLv3 definitions <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1>:
> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.
For icons like this, it’s just that there is no object code, the source code is the only form there is.
But supposing you had your SVG document with high precision, meaningful object IDs, Inkscape PowerStroke data (variable stroke thickness, which gets materialised in SVG as a path that gets fill), editor metadata and the likes, and then fed it through svgo and stripped all that stuff out, leaving just the bare bones, the original would be the source code, and the svg output object code.
To put it in the frame of another format where the difference is more stark, if you design something in Photoshop and you export it as PNG but don’t distribute the PSD, that ain’t Open Source. You can modify it, but not properly.
Or another: C, and a compiled binary. You can patch the binary, but that doesn’t make everything open source.
Having the source code available is not open source nor free software.
Open source is a category of licenses.
What you mean is that it is plaintext, and can be introspected. Great for many practical purposes, yes, but in business context, you are obligated to honor the actual license.
maybe if those SVGs are only used as assets inside an iOS/Android app but not on a webpage accessible via browser ....
If you find a GitHub repository with code inside it and no LICENSE file (or any other license specifier), it is not open source.
And don't tell them about the browser inspector nor how to copy SVG code using that
I didn't want to tell you, but there is a thing called copyright. That said, if you copy SVG it is often easy to change the paths etc. and make it "yours". I guess I'd rather pay a small bit though.
> a thing called copyright
All the chatbot corps out there: And I took that personally.
What is the story? URL to read? (Search resulted in another CEO's $70K salary thing.)
Is this like Pepsi’s Million Dollar logo redesign?
It’s quite the saga, including the designer putting in their portfolio that they actually completed the project as they were ghosting their client: https://x.com/Shpigford/status/1807802947394588842
$5.00/image. The math on that is absurd unless the artist is cranking what, 20 images an hour?
Feels like they thought they had an edge, probably an LLM, and it didn’t work out.
Also feels like it took $70k to generate 14,000 requirements, or the SOW is actually shit and this is all a disaster.
Disclaimer: I don’t read twitter, if all this was spelled out in the link I apologize
If you already starting from an existing set from publicly available sources, and you just need to standardize them amongst each other for consistency, then I can see how that would be kinda reasonable, though I'm no designer myself
perhaps things like giving them a consistent center or consistent brightness/contrast could be done programmatically as well, and maybe there are end user tools to do those things en masse
other tweaks such as selecting between subtle variations found in each icon, or adding some artistic modification, shadow mimicking, etc... can possibly be done, to align the set to a certain pre-defined theme now that I think about it more
seems like a pretty interesting kinda project actually
> Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation ~Baha'u'llah
the designer who chose to instead run with the money probably got insecure or bored, but they would probably be happier if they learned to appreciate the creative process more
So what, he was asking the designer to re-create already existing icons? Or brand new icons for each stock?
Thats insanely fucked up either way of the designer leading them on like that or to ultimately cheat someone
Re-create existing icons, since a lot of these icon packs are not very standardized (e.g. some icons are full logos, some are actual icons, some have borders, some have backgrounds, etc).
Here is a good tweet from another company on why they made their own logos: https://mobile.x.com/tcosta_co/status/1808174493170344345
Came here for this comment.
Seems like a lot of trademark infringement suits about to come their way. Am I mistaken or is there no way this viable? In addition, nobody has any legal right to put others trademarks (use these) on anything without the trademark owners permission. So even if the site and distribution is somehow OK, nobody can really use them anyway. Right?
You're mostly fine unless you are confusing consumers. The purpose of these marks is exactly to avoid that, so you're going to get into a lot of trouble if you use the marks to mislead people in any way.
Take the Air China logo - if a not-so-bright reader might think you are Air China, you're using this all wrong. But if you use an Air China logo to signify the routes actually flown by Air China on a free world map of international flights on your web site, well, yeah, that's Air China, nobody is misled, even a moron knows the little logos on your map of the world aren't actually jet aeroplanes.
I'm not sure if simply offering a brand's logo would be trademark infringement.
Years ago someone contacted me at the company I worked for claiming in some sorta pseudo legal language that we couldn't have one of our competitor's logos on our website. We had it on a promotional page comparing features across similar products.
Turns out we can do that in the US.
It's not trademark infringement to copy or display a logo. Trademark infringement happens when you confuse customers by using a logo or phrase and make them think that you're selling the actual product or that you're somehow endorsed by the original company.
Font Awesome been available since 2013 at least, featuring brand icons https://web.archive.org/web/20130608045113/http://fontawesom...
Seems fine
I always assumed Font Awesome had some business agreement with those orgs eventually as font awesome did charge for some of their icons IIRC.
Having said that, I'm not sure even that is legally necessary.
I imagine avoiding IP legal issues with things like icons could be less about signing agreements with all involved companies and more about having a team that can respond professionally to an inquiry.
Businesses may often not really understand what’s going on and default to being worried about third-party use of their trademarks that they normally must defend. Perhaps they don’t need to worry in this case, where it may actually provide a bit of free advertisement, but if there’s no one on the other side then it wouldn’t help the case.
IANAL
These and others have been online for a while, so I doubt it. There's more here, under the Brands / Social category: https://icones.js.org/
Yes, there are ways someone could use them that would not only run afoul of the trademark, but have trademark holders come after them. However, that doesn't make this useless, because there are proper and gray-area uses of these as well.
They probably each carry their own licensing and terms of use. I'd suspect there's a good number where reuse in some situations would be permitted, and in others would not. But every single one is going to be different, and just making assumptions is a quick way to blindly assume enormous legal liability.
That's why SimpleIcons contains metadata about that, so if you are worried about that, you can just exclude any icons that have explicit licensing information attached.
I assume most brands are happy to see their icons being used/shared on as many platforms as possible. It's just free advertisment.
If someone uses them in a context that's actually problematic for the brand, the brand can still sue them then. But that won't be the common case.
Don’t tell every SaaS company ever. (Who I doubt all have robust legal processes for including logos on their homepages)
You can usually use the assets which are available on the official website, example for meta it is https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/facebook/logo/.
If you see the official logo it has different colors than the one provided in the website, so you can't that for production use cases.
Supplying the assets is not a problem. Most stock art orgs have brands. I suspect that they can get into "gray areas," if they charge for it.
Using them is the problematic part.
Isn't it also copyright infringement, and thus punishable by death in some enlightened jurisdictions [1], or at least by thousands in damages per infringement?
How many infringements do you generate by just loading the front page?
[1] Those most exposed to Hollywood lobbying.
It has existed for years and they actively remove icons when they get a takedown request. I'm sure most companies other than Oracle are happy to be there.
If you are going to use them somewhere in your online product/project, kindly check the License agreement first.
Also check the DISCLAIMER, which seems to be overriding the License:
- Disclaimer: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/master/DIS...
- License (CC0): https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/master/LIC...
Or just draw googly eyes on top and its a parody and totally legal art..
You can also have a NN turn it into a prompt and then recreate the SVG from prompt - shove it through the laundryAImat - nothing is sacred, the world they wanted they have now, let them suffer speared on there own swords.
https://svg.io/
I find it amusing because in the past, I would have used this to find the logo of the company that I'd work for at the time.
I wonder how many employees of said brands will use this rather than their corporate environment to find an svg asset!
I’ve done this. The internal brand center was focused mostly on sales and people interfacing with customers.
I was using it for internal tools though. I’m sure if I made customer facing sites I would need to go through more official channels and make sure all the branding guidelines are followed to the letter.
I had to convert and edit .ai files to get commonly used versions of our logo.
Wish they'd make an SVG for my business! Hah
I use these for everything, I've even corrected a couple of them as sites tend to tweak their logos all the time:
https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons
Surprisingly - No Microsoft logos. (Windows, Office, Azure, ...)
Looks like the legal team reached out and said that making monochrome icons isn't allowed [0]
0: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/11236
very interesting
Adobe seems to have no problem selling monochrome logos of Microsoft products
https://stock.adobe.com/search?k=ms+word&asset_id=595866420
That's really a shitty move from MS. But, technically, since they're still in the commit history, you can retrieve them for personnal/private use.
While it’s easier to have everything in one repo, Microsoft do have icon packs with svgs.
The site is broken for me on Safari (Mac), works in Chrome.
For all others Try Brandfetch and their plugins in Miro and canva
I read this as svg icons of size 3 kilobytes
The first one I downloaded (RTÉ colour) is an invalid SVG file.
Incidentally, what is the third icon on the home page, /e/? There's a name impossible to google.
The É is entity-encoded as É in the SVG, but then they generate `data:` URIs in this specific place, but don’t URL-encode the # as %23.
> Incidentally, what is the third icon on the home page, /e/? There's a name impossible to google.
https://e.foundation/e-os/
So degoogled you can't even google them!
Oh that's great, I'm always looking for logos for apps
Is this sarcasm? This seems like an uncommon thing to want.
I did not expect to see AEW (All Elite Wrestling) on the list.
Automatic like for including Beekeeper Studio :-D.
Doesn't have pornhub or Brazzers, not even logo SVG archiving escapes the tentacles of the moral police (keep in mind pornhub it's one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world)
Also no Microsoft logos (top two biggest companies in the world). The moral police are out of control! /s
Microsoft legal requested they remove their logos.
https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/11236
Except I actually looked for the other top 10 most popular websites before making my comment, they are all there (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al), as you may know Microsoft.com doesn't even make it to the top 100
Just what I needed today. Thank you!
Alternatively: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons
Doesn't have Grindr, disappointing.