alex diavatis | January 25, 2013

GNOME Symbolic Icons | An alternative to Glyphicons?

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

gnome-symbolic-icons-smallOne of the most popular icon sets is Glyphicons. Primarily made for Apple Products and iPhone Applications, they can be used in many more places like WebApps. Actually Glyphicons are mostly famous from Twitter Bootstrap.

GNOME has also its very own monochromatic icon set, it looks cool and you can use it use to any Application you want, free of charge!

Licenses & Pricing

Glyphicons come with  Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) where GNOME Symbolic Icons come with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. I don’t know the differences, but in both you required to include an attribution to their pages. glyphicons.com for Glyphicons and gnome.org for GNOME Symbolic, or just refer the GNOME Project. Reading the licenses a bit, in GNOME case things is a bit more “free”.

Glyphicons with vectors (sources) cost $59 while GNOME symbolic are free (as beer).

Icons

Glyphicons are more completed for general use, but GNOME Symbolic also don’t lack much behind, and constantly are getting improved. They don’t include socials but they do include some nice emotes!

Symbolic

Joern  Konopka ”draw” the GNOME logo with Symbolics.

gnome-symbolic-icons
This is not the completed set. To get it:

$ git clone git://git.gnome.org/gnome-icon-theme-symbolic

Glyphicons
glyphicons_halflings
To get the full set of Glyphicons just visit their page, glyphicons.com.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea if GNOME Artwork could go further from GNOME borders, and make GNOME more familiar to people. Twitter Bootstrap gives this attribution:

Glyphicons Halflings are normally not available for free, but an arrangement between Bootstrap and the Glyphicons creators have made this possible at no cost to you as developers. As a thank you, we ask you to include an optional link back to Glyphicons whenever practical.

If we could change it:

GNOME Symbolic Icons are available for free. As a thank you, we ask you to include an optional link back to GNOME PROJECT whenever practical.

To make my point clear ;)

Also there are Font Awesome Icons, which is a Icon set similar to Glyphicons, but attribution is not required.

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  • http://twitter.com/varemenos Adonis K (Vαяēмēиøš)

    Ammm, why not Font-Awesome?

    fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

    • alex285

      oops I missed that, I added it ..Thanks!

  • 7svito

    Nice picture.
    Wallpaper resolution available?

    • alex285

      Sure

    • alex285

      Take it form the other comment, coz disqus got bugged :)

  • alex285

    Wall

  • JJ

    They made these fantastic symbolic icons. I wonder why don’t they create a regular icon set? No one in Gnome find those disgusting and thought of changing those (at least the folder icons)?

    • alex285

      Gimmac made most of Symbolic and other icons in GNOME. Here is his answer about the folder icons https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689307

      • 7svito

        The actual problem is not the color. They look just awesome on 64 px. The problem that on 48 they get “Accessibility border” or whatever and looks worse with each size decrease.

        • 7svito

          Here is Gnome icon theme with deleted small sizes, so all icons scaled from 256×256 and the original. Even in modals they look good.

          • 7svito

            Too bad Discuss does not recognize PNG’s :S
            Now Gnome is my favorite icon theme:)

      • Michael Mistretta

        First thing I do on any linux install is install Faenza/Faience icons. =P

  • http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

    I love symbolic icons, I hope eventually all of gnome uses them. I love how they work regardless of theme (with normal icons you often run into problems if you use a theme that has both dark and light elements for example, ending up with dark on dark or light on light.)

  • Craig

    This post is all kinds of clueless. If you’re going to blog about licenses, please make an effort to get a clue what they are. how they’re different and what they entail.

    • alex285

      hmm? I don’t talk about licenses I just refer them. If you’re talking about the more “free” it isn’t about the license. It’s about the authors notes how to use the artworks.