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It’s like the whole web has come to the conclusion that icons have to be monochrome and boring. Why? What is this group-think? Why do other styles of icons “look dated”? I have nothing against the “metro” or “modern” (by m$) style per se. Like all designs it has its strengths and weaknesses. But I miss variety, Icon-sets (or websites for that matter) with personality. “metro” used to have personality, but has long since lost it because everything looks the same. Anyone here remember the silk icons? [1] I’m not arguing they are superior. But moar variety please: “silk icons”, “flat icons”, “silly icons”, “school icons”, “cartoon icons”… </rant>

[1]: http://famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/preview.php


I remember the Silk icons, I still have a soft spot for them. I even tried using them in an app, but they upscale very poorly even with xBRZ (IIRC I used something like https://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/files/ScalerTest_1.1.z...).

Similarly, Visual Studio actually comes with an icon library at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/..., though 2012 sadly switched from 3D icons (a mixed bag, some beautiful ones and then some awful ones like a downscaled yellow-shaded XP-era exclamation point triangle) to flat line art indistinguishable from today's icon style except in having backgrounds. You can find "totally legal" offline downloads of VS2010 on archive.org (the online installer is down).

> I even tried using them in an app, but they upscale very poorly

Someone made the effort and ported them to .svg [1]

Donationware

[1]: https://codefisher.org/pastel-svg/

Interesting icon set. I love the idea behind it, but looking at their icon preview at https://i0.wp.com/codefisher.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/..., I noticed that some images look great at higher resolutions (the star), while others look like a bad hqx/xbrz job, with a mix of curved, pixel-aligned (lock, book, anchor, monitor stand), and blurred features (book stripes), with inconsistent line widths (the house's roof and bushes, the computer stand and anchor).

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