HN Explorer

I created 3,800+ Open Source React Icons (Beautiful, Rounded Style) (github.com)

166 points by masum_parvej ↗ HN
I’ve created a library of beautiful rounded icons and would like to share it with the Hacker News community. Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

Features:

- Beautifully rounded style - Over 3,800 icons - Editable stroke - Regularly adding new icons - Another standard version (less rounded) coming soon - Easy installation via npm or yarn

55 comments

[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread
jnsie
These look great. I'm a bit ignorant on the topic - what makes an icon a 'Reach Icon'? Can these only be used in React apps? Am I missing something fundamental?
masum_parvej
Thanks for your interest!

To clarify, these icons can be used in any interface.

The term 'React Icons' refers to the specific React package we've created to make it easy for developers to integrate these icons into React and React Native applications.

However, you can absolutely use these icons in other ways as well.

They are available through a Figma plugin, WordPress, and directly in HTML-CSS via SVG.

Compatible with any framework.

I hope this clears up any confusion!

jnsie
It does. Thank you for the clarification!
recursive
The name "React" in the title implies that this library has a dependence on React. I almost wrote it off for my purposes before I realized that it really doesn't have anything to do with React.
jeremyjh
Yet there are other developers who are unaware the possibilities of non-react web development or how to use any resource that isn't installed with NPM. Tough call from a marketing perspective.
bdcravens
I would think the basics of HTML resources is a minimal bar for calling yourself a "developer" (at that stage you're still a student or an apprentice)
rjbwork
You can call yourself whatever you can get away with. There are a whole lot of people out there that have never slung anything but React-flavored JS being called developers and being paid to do it. The industry needs these technicians too, I guess.
technion
Unfortunately it's a pretty common issue in react forums. There was a discussion recently about there being no way to create s3 upload urls in react. I mean of there are several npm modules, but non have react hooks so nothing was viewed as usable.
pimlottc
What makes these icons particularly “huge”?
masum_parvej
Just a name, but also, we have a huge number of icons and we're adding more regularly. Currently, we have a total of over 27,000 icons, and more than 8,000 icons are under creation. We've made all stroke icons completely free.
KTibow
Shout out to Iconify, it consolidates many icon sets into compatible SVGs.
masum_parvej
Yes, Iconify is indeed a great resource. We really appreciate their work in consolidating various icon sets into compatible SVGs. It's incredibly helpful!
bennettcohen
Love hugeicons but have been directly downloading SVGs into my svelte project. Any package coming soon?
masum_parvej
Thank you for using Hugeicons and for your feedback. We are currently a small team focusing on developing the Icon font package. Once this is complete, we plan to expand our offerings to include support for Flutter, Vue, Angular, Vue-next, Solid, and Svelte.
8mobile
Hi, thanks for your contribution. I really like the icons and I think I will use them in the next project.
ananya_paw
icons are really premium looking. are they open-source too?
carban
The customization tool is the best for me, user friendly and feature rich. I will use it for my next projects.
simple10
These are great! Nice work.

I was a little confused on the pricing page[1]. Since the icons are free to download, is the main reason to pay to get access to Figma files?

https://hugeicons.com/pricing

masum_parvej
Let me explain: There are 7 styles of icons, totaling 28,000+ icons currently, with an additional 8,000+ icons nearly ready.

Of these, 3,800 icons+ (4k apprx.) are completely free. They are free in the web app, free in the Figma file, free in the plugins,free on npm (almost everywhere).

Hope this helps.

simple10
Ah, thanks. That definitely clarifies it.

For the pro license, am I able to build a tool that allows my users to search and select SVG icons to use in their webpages created in my app? My app is a website builder. I'd love to enable support for hugeicons. But maybe this is a gray area use case for the pro license?

https://docs.hugeicons.com/faqs/license-questions

masum_parvej
Hi, really appreciate your interest.

For the use case you said, I see there's two possible way to use it,

1. Your users who are also Pro subscribers of Hugeicons can use their license keys to access and utilize Pro icons directly within your platform.

2. They only use free stroke icons from your platform.

The updated license agreement is this: https://hugeicons.com/license-agreement

Liquix
It looks like the pro version has 27,000 icons (vs. the free 3,800) and bundles N requests for custom icons per month. Beautiful icon sets are a dime a dozen. But direct contact with the set's creator to design custom icons for your product/brand seems like a rare and attractive perk. I guess it depends on what exactly "request" means in practice
causality0
These look very nice for marketing purposes but as I user I despise this trend of making the icons for everything look nearly identical to each other. It completely defeats the purpose of having an icon in the first place.
mdwelsh
These look great. The page says "Thousands of designers, developers, and content creators use HugeIcons Pro". Is this accurate? The project seems to have only about 493 downloads a week on NPM, and 194 GitHub stars. I would have expected a lot more given the number of people you claim are using the library.

(Edit: For clarification, the NPM stats refer to the number of times the library was fetched from NPM's servers, not the number of times a developer incorporated it into a project. For popular NPM libraries, this number can be in the many millions of downloads per week. My confusion stems from the fact a library used by thousands of projects will have substantially higher numbers in NPM than what is seen here. It is of course possible that this number counts developers incorporating these icons not through the NPM library.)

kachapopopow
493 a week sounds like thousands over a month no?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
hi-v-rocknroll
Tying to React is limiting.

It would be better to have a neutral way to use them like FA that also does React, Vue, and SVG too.

https://fontawesome.com/icons/camera-retro?f=classic&s=thin

badrabbit
This is subjective so I hope it is ok for me to say this: the icons are not beautiful. They feel artificial and generic. At least they are not square. But they do lack character and personality. If your goal is to conform to what UI designers think is modern and stylish this is great, but speaking as a user I am tired of this boring ui trend that lacks any sort if boldness. It's just not "cool".
masum_parvej
It's completely okay; everyone has their own preferences. While some may love this style, others might not—it's all about choice.

We're grateful to have over 50,000+ users/month who love what we offer.

Respect your perspective as it will help us consider our approach and strive to cater to a broader audience.

Could you share examples of designs or styles that you find appealing? Any specific icon library you like would be really helpful.

badrabbit
Great reply, sorry my response is late but 1998-2003 era desktop icons are a good example. Of course it would be an explicit retro look today but short of a mockup what I can say us that those classic icons felt tangible. They were not afraid to raise a bevel or do 3d. What I expect today us the cool graphics we saw in futuristic ui's in movies but even better. These modern icons feel like a fancy artsy scribble.

I am glad for you that your product is popular and I wouldn't suggest not chasing that. But your customers don't have many good style options these days. If you forgot everything about ui trends and consider something like the button or scrollbar and how real users prefer windows 98's version over win11 or macos and consider why that is, maybe you can set the trend.

Why squares and scribbles when you can do cool animated 3d that is bold and beautiful?

forsakenharmony
Just a heads up: you should not put 3800+ Icons behind a single export, it will really slow down dev server performance as it has to parse all of them. (Barrel files aren't great)
ags1905
Even though I appreciate the work that must have gone into the creation of the icons, I do not like them at all and I would not consider using them, ever. Why would I look all day at black and white wire-frame icons? I consider colorful icons to be beautiful, ones that closely follow the color and shape of original objects. Like Haiku icons, for example. https://www.haiku-os.org/development/icon-guidelines
rossant
Wow I feel like I'm back in 2006 or something. I agree they look nice though.
mosselman
How much work does it take to create 3800 icons let alone 27000? It sounds like months of focussed work to me
masum_parvej
It takes a lot of time. We started building this product in 2020. We did it slowly and gradually.
mosselman
Very cool. They look great. Thanks for this