A friend came to find me earlier and asked me if I knew a good designer who could make him some icons. His problem was he had some icons already and wanted to complete his set with a few more, but struggled to find some that would match. 

It struck me that there are a lot of blog posts in the wild on the subject of icons, but none of them organise the sets in a way that they can complete each other.

So I started to compile a list for him recording all the icon sets I know, and organised them by style. If he found this useful, it might be useful you too, hence this post.

Here is my list for the black and white, iOS-like sets. I will post a list of full-color icons next. 

Glyphish

Price: free (with attribution) to $25

The free set contains 200 icons that you can use in your commercial app if you give them attribution and you can add 200 more for 25 bucks. The set is very complete, and contains social media, sport, transport, hobbies, health, pictures, music, videos controls etc.

The set contains PNGs, in 2 different sizes, so they are very easy to integrate in your apps, but don’t contain the AI files, which makes it difficult to modify or add an icon to your set if you need to.

We used them in our slidingNav demo app, and they are very slick.

Cocoa Controls icons for iOS

Price: $15

File type: PNG (including x2 retina size)

This set contains 450 icons, and is very complete too. It covers roughly the same subjects as Glyphish, above, in a very similar style. However, whilst there is a lot of overlap between the two sets, there are also some differences that might be just what you need (for instance, there is an upload/download pair in this kit)

There is no free version of this kit, but you get a lot of icons for your money.

App-bits

Price: free with attribution for commercial use

64 nice looking tab bar icons, free under the creative common licence. Clearly not the most complete set of the lot, but you can get a database image in there that you couldn't find anywhere else.

TokenKit

Price: free for non-commercial use. Commercial: $50 for PNGs and ICO to $75 (including AI files)

The set contains 128 high quality icons available in dark and light colours, ICO and PNGs.

The icons are organised by categories: Adobe, Communications & Internet, Devices, Multimedia, Micelaneous, Office, OS & Folders and Systems & Settings. The navigation by folder is a bit cumbersome, but well worth it to find the gem you are after.

The PNGs files are rather big (128*128 pixels) so you won't have definition issues, but they'll need resizing in your app.

The image above points at the free set, but you should see http://brsev.com/#licensing to get the commercial license.

Working Group's mobile toolbar icons

Price: Free, for commercial and non-commercial with attribution

The set contains 160 icons, and the download contains a PSD file as well as the PNG files. The link above will give you the standard 30*30 size, but they exist for retina display too.

Pixel Press Icons

Price: Free to $69 according to the set.

The free set contains 51 PNG icons available in 30*30 and 60*60 pixels, so they will work for retina displays too. You can use them for free under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada license.

For $29, you will have the full White Space "pixel collection" set, containing 352 icons, available in Black or White and in 3 different sizes: 20*20, 30*30 and 60*60 pixels. This could be handy if you don't want to loose definition when you are resizing down.

The AI files are available too in the "vector collection" set that will cost you $69.  

This was the last set of this series I found, but if you know of another set I didn't list, please post it here!