Icons

Icon packs for websites, apps and presentations

Icons are where Pixelbuddha started. Some of our earliest releases were icon sets drawn in-house, and Ballicons, a series of round flat icons that grew to three volumes, became one of the sets people still associate with the studio. Line icon packs such as Buddha Line Icons and Smallicons followed, and many of them are still free in the collection.

The way we judge a set has not changed since then. We look for a family: one stroke weight, one corner radius, one grid, one level of detail running through every icon. A pack where the camera is drawn more carefully than the calendar looks broken in an interface, no matter how good each icon is on its own.

The style, on the other hand, has moved a lot. Landing pages, onboarding screens and presentations now use soft 3D icons for their bigger moments, so the newest part of the library is 3D sets grouped by theme, from business and education to food, travel and holidays. Retro has its fans too: the Y2K icon collection is the most downloaded icon set on the site this year.

Styles you will find

• Soft 3D icons: rounded, clay-like objects for hero sections, onboarding screens, presentations and social graphics.
• Line icons: single-weight outlines for navigation, menus and dense interfaces.
• Flat icons: filled shapes in a few colors for infographics, websites and slides.
• Pixel and Y2K icons: retro sets for playful and nostalgic projects.

Themes and the projects they fit

A themed pack saves the most time when it matches the product you are designing, because the set already contains the less obvious icons a real interface needs, not only the obvious ones.

• Business, finance and e-commerce: dashboards, banking and fintech apps, online stores. Look for the unglamorous icons such as invoices, refunds, filters and delivery status; they are the ones that are hard to find later.
• Technology, web and design tools: SaaS landing pages, developer documentation and app onboarding, where 3D icons work as illustrations for feature sections.
• Education, science and health: online courses, school portals and healthcare apps. Medical icons should be calm and clear, and the red cross on a white background is a protected emblem in most countries, so medical sets use other symbols for first aid and health.
• Travel, transport, maps and buildings: booking services, city guides, real estate listings and navigation apps.
• Food, beauty and fashion: restaurant menus, delivery apps, salon booking and online shops.
• Holidays, celebrations, sport and entertainment: seasonal campaigns, event pages, newsletters and social graphics, where a short-lived set can carry the theme without redesigning the brand.

Getting icons to look consistent

Use one set per project wherever you can. When a project needs icons the set does not have, draw them to the same rules instead of borrowing from another set:

• Grid and padding. Most interface icons are drawn on a 24 px grid with a margin of about 2 px, so icons of different shapes look the same size.
• Stroke and corners. Keep the stroke weight and corner radius identical across the set; a 1.5 px icon next to a 2 px one looks broken even if the shapes are fine.
• Optical balance. A circle drawn to the edge of the grid looks smaller than a square of the same size, so round icons are usually drawn slightly larger.
• Export. Use SVG for interfaces so icons stay sharp on every screen and can be recolored with code, and PNG at 2x or 3x for presentations and social graphics.
• Accessibility. Icons that carry meaning need a text label or an accessible name, and their color should have enough contrast against the background, at least 3:1 under WCAG guidelines for interface graphics.