Dear Internet,
Please give a friendly welcome to icon-fu, the somewhat revolutionary new online icon editor and library. You, dear readers of public interface, have this exclusive opportunity to be among the first users of icon-fu. Browse and search among over 8000 free (creative-commons-licensed and public domain) icons. Download an icon directly and use it, tweak it in the editor, or build your own icon from scratch using the easy-to-use icon-fu editor.
It's a pixel-oriented editor, because with really small images, every pixel needs to be right - even scaled down vector images need some tweaking to look just right. Icon-fu renders PNG images with full 8-bit transparency. The editor offers the usual tools - rotate, crop, shift, flip, blur, contrast, gradient painting, and supports multiple floating copies of image fragments that can be composed in a variety of ways. It allows images of up to 32 x 32 pixels (that makes 1024 pixels, a lot of clicking - any more than that and you need a different kind of editor).
The target audience are software developers who need icons but don't have access to graphic design experts, and don't have the time to acquire and learn to use expensive image creation tools. This project was in fact born from the myriad sequential frustrations of failing to find the right icon, or worse, finding one that was almost right, but not having the tools to fix it in an elegant way.
The editor tools are written entirely in javascript, which opens up the possibility of user-contributed tools. The javascript API needs to settle down a little before that can happen.
As a user, you can draw your own icons or tweak existing ones. Optionally, you can publish your work to the icon-fu library to share with others, or to rework it later. All icons are either public domain or published under a creative-commons license. You cannot use this application to publish images whose license prohibits free copying, re-use, redistribution, and remixing.
Firefox 3, Safari, and Opera 9 all run icon-fu smoothly (even Safari on your iPhone); Firefox 2 and Chrome are unsatisfactory, and IE is just a lost cause for now (there may be hope for IE8 however).
Your feedback at this early stage of the project is really important and will be highly appreciated. Many many thanks to all who have helped so far ... next lunch is on me!
Icon-Fu also thanks the various people who have published some awesome free icon sets (these make the bulk of icon-fu's initial library) - Mark James, Everaldo Coelho, Yusuke Kamiyamane, The Tango Project, Kitae Kim, Joseph North, Kevin Wetzels, and Eoin McGrath
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