Webiconset.com offers for download three small sets of  icons (10 icons per set ) for both personal and commercial use. The Icons are high quality and come in 4 sizes –  128, 64, 48 and 32 pixels, in png format.

Aplication Icon Set

contains: Register, Settings, Users, Database, Login, Chat, Add, Delete, Edit, Invoice.

Cute Blogging Icon

Set has the next icons : Design, Download, Freelance, Part-time, Hire Me, Not Available, About Me, Services, My Blog, Contact.

while the last set

Mobile Icons Set

includes Phone Call, Photos, Messages, Calculator, Wireless, Calendar, Settings, Contacts, Notes, Map.

There’s no reason for our Google Maps to look ugly because of  the icons Google used to offer. Now have become available a huge number of icons offered by Nico Mollet under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. The cherry on the cake is that they give away everything related to these icons so everybody can develop their own icons based on the original Photoshop files.

The Google Map icons set now includes:

1. Grocery
2. water sports
3. winter
4. Administration, Office & Industry
5. Culture & Entertainment
6. Education & Kids
7. Events & Weather
8. Friends, Family & Real Estate
9. Media
10. Miscellaneous
11. Restaurants & Hotels
12. Sports, Health & Beauty
13. Stores
14. Tourism & Nature
15. Transportation

As far as I see they intend to continue developing icons so the future looks bright for our Google Maps.

Due the limited number of fonts available for web we need to make use of other techniques to make our design look the way we want.

Most of the time we simply cut the image from the psd file and place it in the html/css. But this has impact over the accessibility of the site and the compatibility with other browsers (for example text browsers or browsers with  images/CSS disabled)

Of course there are workarounds and fixes for this in orderto improve usability, but what do we do in case our page is dynamic?

In this case we can use text replacement techniques -  some of them presented below:

SIFR2

SIFR2 is  updated with SIFR3  but deserves to be mentioned as it became SIFR3.  Read below.

SIFR3

No need  to tell too much – it uses flash to replace the text in a webpage  with the font specified by the designer. The site presents all the required steps to setup the script.  For me as a non-flash user seems very complicated  and I think this is a huge drawback for this script – it also might discourage other people from using it.  The advantage? – Flash is supported by 99% of  today’s browsers.

There is a little online helper that is very handy in creating the needed files: sIFR Generator and a library for already generated fonts: sifrVault

Cufón

Cufon takes a different approach using Javascript to apply some proprietary generated font files. The renderer creates a SVG canvas(non IE browsers) or a VML representation (IE browsers) altough  SVG seems to be slow in some browsers.

p+c dtr

“P+C DTR allows you to take a vanilla standards-based (X)HTML web page and dynamically create images to replace and enhance page headings using only PHP + CSS.”

Some further stuff about it:

P+C DTR is based on Dynamic Text Replacement script  but allows you to integrate it in your site without any modification –  well… except the setup of the script.

An improvement of this script is done by João Makray , allowing you to have word-wraps.

Flir

“Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) to <span> elements and everything in between!” . No more comments –  it’s self explanatory.

typeface.js

An alternative for cufon.

Fontjazz

Fontjazz takes a different approach, generating one file with images for each glimpse in a font –  you can select which ones –  and then using Javascript to manipulate the DOM of your page & adding the fonts in specified locations.

Kernest

Kernest technically is not a font replacement technique but it makes use of @font-face –  which is supported by modern browsers –  and allows you to use a free font, or to “rent” one for a year.

Do you know others? Let me know

SemLabs just released two free iconsets:

Free Web Design Icon Set

The Free Web Design Icon Set is a collection of 310 icons in PNG format. They are 16×16 pixels and they’re designed to be used on web projects but may also be useful for systems icons and for print. This icon pack is free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects, modify and distribute.

and

SEM Labs Web Blog Icon Pack

The SEM Labs Icon Set is a pack of 52 icons in PNG format. They are 48×48 pixels and they’re specifically designed for blogs and have an SEO theme. However over the coming months more icons will be added to it to give them a broader scope.

They are released under the Creative Commons (by) Licence.

Function is a set of 128 free to use icons, in 48×48 pixels format. This set includes some of the main Social Media Icons such as: Design Float, Digg, Delicious, Furl, Technorati, Flickr, Stumble Upon, Twitter & Many more…

Dezinerfolio has some freebies section on their site. Here you can find the On-stage iconset, free icons for commercial use.

Unlike other free sets, this one contains the psd files too.

Here is the original post.

Iconeden gives for free a subset of their Fresh iconset.

Midtone design studio provides this set of icons  free for use in any project.

Even if it is a little offtopic, I want to say that I really like the design of this site. Midtone Design Studio belongs to Jonatan Castro Fernández, a spanish freelance graphic and interface designer who lives in Ourense, Spain. 

Update with some new icons

I love these icons from Midtone too – they are free.

60 icons, semi-transparent .png icons (16 x 16) to be used  for commercial purposes, by tenbytwenty.com.

Mini icon collection provides what its name says –  a set of mini 10 x 10  pixels icons. 

There are more then 100 icons that can be used in any project.