Icons to spice up your Website, blog, or app!

Many times as a teacher you may be asked to create presentations, a portfolio, website, or newsletter.  You are using these to communicate to parents, students, or other teachers/administrators. While you have the content, it helps to have images or icons to make your content more visually appealing. Of course Microsoft Office comes stacked with Clip Art that you can use in your projects for newsletters and presentations, but if you would like a different feel or need an icon for a website or app you will need to resort to some other resource.

Four resources for icons and clip art like images are IconFinder.net, iconlet.com, iconspedia.com, and iconArchive.com. There does seem to be an overlap between the images that all four search engines locate for you. Many of the icons seem to have an updated look, although there are some icons which bring up thoughts of icons past similar to the Nintendo NES graphics.

I did find that searching for certain types of icons, needed creative thinking when entering search terms, but you may be rewarded with some equally creatively designed graphics.  These sites also find creative designs for commonly used icons such as social network logos, rss/podcast feeds, and food icons.

RSS icon from Iconfinder.net

RSS Feed from Iconspedia.com

Iconarchive’s search is not as visual as I would have liked for an image search site, but a work around is to use a site search in your favorite browser such as Google or Yahoo. For example, if you want to search for a rss feed icon in the iconarchive.com website, you would enter [search term] site:www.iconarchive.com into the search bar ( rss site:www.iconarchive.com ). After the search has run, then you can click on images and see the image results returned.

Hopefully these resources will benefit you in your websites, presentations and newsletters.