I’m an icon addict. I love these little symbols. I am not alone: Google search for the word icon delivers 363 million hits. Featured by the numerous eye-candy upcoming blogs icons are evading from the ‘just information’-character … and are getting bigger in size. The biggest icon I saw was about 500 x 500 pixels – wow.

My first adress to look for icons is definitely IconBuffet. This community site delivers cute and helpful icons free for private and commercial use. I filled the picture at the beginning of this post with some of them. Indispensible for every web designer is the well known (but always to mention) fabulous Silk Set from Marc James. With over 700 icons neatly designed everybody finds his share. From the same source a tiny fine set is Mint – recommendable…

• The Notebook iconset from Manuela Hoffmann is a true hit. Very special!
• Toolbar Icons from Matt Ball are highly recommendable.
• Everaldo Coelho produced a beautiful KDE Crystal Clear Set. Wonderful, not only for KDE…
• My fellow countrymen, the widely known Bartelme shares a beauiful shopping cart icon with the world.
• Deziner Folio delivered the free Aqua Gloss Set for private and commercial projects.
• Web 2.0 Buttons 3D-style you’ll find on Utom Box for free download.
• Liquidicity gives you 165 free to use vector icons – so you can alter them in Illustrator for your needs – handy!

I could go on for hours. Not included or mentioned are thousands of sites which promote icons strictly for private desktop use – as it says: not useful to design websites with them. I hope to amend much more links in the next weeks to build up a profound linkpage for icons which we can use in our commercial and private projects. Feel free to post other sites you find worth mentioning.