base6 Design Blog | base6 Design

July 6, 2009

Anyone who has followed me on twitter over the past 6 months should notice that I love free icon packs. In fact – I consider it a nerdy hobby downloading and collecting as many of them as I can. Last count 1000s of icons on my local hard drive sourced from places like Smashing Magazine, Noupe and Outlaw Design.

Sticky Issue

Last year I fell in love with the mouthwateringly excellent ‘Stricker Icon Pack‘ designed by David Lanham. So much so in fact I used them as the main icon set when re-designing the base6 design website back in May this year. You can clearly see them littering the site on the base6 homepage and in the site footer – I even dirtied up the icons to add to the slight-grunge effect I’d implemented in the new design – this is all detailed on my section ‘About this website‘.

Turns out, by doing this, I’d violated the terms of the icon pack and today I received an email from Iconfactory asking me to remove the icons asap, bummer

From the terms:

They are intended for personal desktop use ONLY. They may not be disassembled, reverse-engineered or otherwise modified, in part or in whole except for personal desktop use.

Lessons learned

As a GPL fanatic I often fall into the trap of assuming that releases such as the Sticker Icon Pack are ‘free’ as in ‘FREE’ to use, re-distribute and modify as long as you quote or at least contact the source designer/developer.

When it comes to icon packs and other ‘free’ graphics that are promoted around the web this is often not the case. Its clear to me now that the bulk of these resources are designed and released for personal use only and should never be used for quasi-commercial purposes.

My advice – check the terms. If you downloaded the icons from one of those popular ’6000 FREE COOL ICONS’ articles as I did then use Google to find the original source and contact the publisher before using them in a live design. Don’t be blinkered by the prospects of a juicy freebie as I have been in this case.

Next step

I’ve never been great at designing high quality icons. I find the process of designing something so small and pixel-dependent a real challange. Its a black art akin to the video game sprite designers of the 70s and 80s which I have always admired.

So my plan is to spend the next few days trawlling through IconDock and Graphic River to find some suitible replacement icons and re-working the base6 site around this.

Finally

I hope this has served as both a warning to my peers and an appology to David Lanham for being so naive. I was blinded by the outstanding quality of the icon pack which was presented to me. Its a shame I can’t use them on this site for much longer, let the time they have served here stand as a tribute to their caliber.