Icons are a vital part of any modern web design, but building a custom icon set can be time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, the web is filled with fantastic resources for high-quality, free icons. Knowing where to look and how to use them can save you countless hours and elevate your design.

This guide will walk you through the best places to find free icons and the key things to consider when using them in your projects.

Why Use Icons?

Before we dive in, a quick reminder of why icons are so powerful:

• Improve Readability: They break up text and provide quick visual cues.
• Universal Language: A well-chosen icon can be understood by users regardless of their language.
• Save Space: They can replace lengthy text labels, especially on mobile devices.
• Enhance Aesthetics: A consistent icon set makes a design look polished and professional.

Where to Find High-Quality Free Icons

There are many great resources for free icons, but they generally fall into two categories: large libraries and curated sets.

1. Large Icon Libraries (The "Everything" Packs)

These are massive collections offering thousands of icons in a consistent style. They are perfect when you need a wide variety of symbols for a large application.

• Lucide: An open-source, community-driven fork of the popular Feather icons. It's lightweight, has over 1000 icons, and is highly customizable. It's the library that powers the BraveColors Icon Explorer!
• Feather Icons: A beloved collection of simple, clean, and beautiful open-source icons.
• Material Symbols (from Google): An enormous library with thousands of icons in three styles (outlined, rounded, sharp) and variable font axes for fine-tuning.
• Font Awesome (Free Tier): While it has a pro version, Font Awesome's free set still contains over 2,000 icons and is a web standard.

2. Curated Icon Platforms

These platforms host icons from thousands of different designers. They are great for finding more unique or illustrative styles, but you need to be careful to maintain consistency.

• The Noun Project: An almost infinite library of icons for "everything." Many are free with attribution.
• Flaticon: A huge database of free icons, often available in different styles (flat, line, color). Requires attribution for free use.
• Icon-icons.com: A straightforward site with a large collection of free icons for personal and commercial use.

Understanding Licenses: Can I Really Use This for Free?

"Free" doesn't always mean free of conditions. It's crucial to understand the license associated with any icon set you download.

• Public Domain (or CC0): You can do anything you want with these icons. No attribution is required.
• MIT, Apache, or similar Open-Source Licenses: These are very permissive. You can use, modify, and distribute the icons freely, even in commercial projects. You just need to keep the original copyright notice (usually in your code, not on the public-facing site). Libraries like Lucide use the MIT license.
• Creative Commons with Attribution (CC BY): This is very common. You can use the icon for free, but you must give credit to the original creator somewhere on your site (often in the footer). Platforms like The Noun Project and Flaticon often require this for their free icons.

Always check the license before using an icon. Failure to provide attribution when required is a violation of the creator's copyright.

The Best Way to Use Icons in Your Project

While you can download icons as PNG or JPG files, the most flexible and modern way to use them is as SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics).

SVGs are code-based, which means:

• They are infinitely scalable without losing quality.
• You can change their color, stroke width, and other properties with CSS.
• They are extremely lightweight, which is great for performance.

The best way to manage SVGs in a modern web project is with an icon library component system. For example, in a React project, a library like lucide-react allows you to import each icon as a component:

import { Zap } from 'lucide-react';

function MyComponent() {
  return <p>Supercharge your workflow! <Zap color="orange" /></p>;
}

Ready to find the perfect icon? The BraveColors Icon Explorer lets you search, customize, and get the code for thousands of free, open-source SVG icons from the Lucide library. It's the fastest way to get high-quality icons into your project.