Non-Standard Social Icons

[Mittineague]

Continuing the discussion from 10 Quality Free Flat Icon Sets for Your Designs:

@adaivanoff

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/10-quality-free-flat-icon-sets-designs/

Flat design has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. This is hardly surprising because flat design has a lot of artistic and even technical advantages.

If you have embraced flat design as a concept, then you are very likely always looking for tasteful new flat resources to use in your designs.

You're in luck! That's exactly what we're going to deliver today.

The icons I'm going to present today are predominantly minimal with clean draw and no-frills. Most of the icons here are UI-oriented but there are also some general icon sets.

In this series we'll offer you a selection of some social icons, computer and general tech, as well as shopping, money, and ecommerce ones, though not all of them will be flat.

I presume most of you do it anyway but I think it won't hurt to remind you once more: As with any freebies, before you use them, especially in a commercial projects, read the license – just in case. It's quite possible some of the icons were free when I included them in the article but the license changed after that. It’s always better to be safe than sorry – just double-check that license.

After these necessary clarifications, let's move to the icon sets themselves.

⋮

10. Flat Vector Social Icons

The choice of social icons – flat or otherwise – is really huge. However, if you are just looking for simple, minimal, flat social icons, your options are narrowed. I really like this simple, minimal, flat pack of social icons from Vecteezy.

The set contains 12 icons of the most popular social services. Each icon comes in a square, rounded, and circle flat varieties. The pack is available in EPS and PNG (32×32 with a 16×16 centered icon placement).

So, there you have it — 10 diverse flat icon sets for your next project.

And as I mentioned in the beginning of the article, I'll be rounding up some of my favorite icons sets based around particular themes in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned.

Continue reading this article on SitePoint

Social Media is popular and social icons are nearly ubiquitous.
Site design varies, so it is understandable that using non-standard icons might be preferred.

But is it legal?

For example, if you look at the following, you will see that Branding seems to be very important.

Facebook
https://www.facebookbrand.com/
https://www.facebookbrand.com/dos-donts

Twitter
https://dev.twitter.com/overview/general/image-resources
https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets

Linkedin
https://brand.linkedin.com/
https://brand.linkedin.com/policies

Google
https://developers.google.com/+/branding-guidelines

YouTube
https://developers.google.com/youtube/branding_guidelines
https://www.youtube.com/yt/brand/using-logo.html

Yet non-standard variations of social icons can be seen on a large number of sites.

My guess is that the “Terms” are in place so that “if” an entity wants to pursue legal action they “can” but in most cases the Terms are unenforced.

At least I’ve never heard of anyone having problems using non-standard social icons. Have you?

[adaivanoff]

I had similar thoughts when I was researching the Payment Icons article (not published yet but coming soon) because the icons basically were just the logo of the service and some artwork around it (sometimes, in many cases nothing but the logo). I guess if the icon uses the logo without modifying it (i.e. replacing the fonts or something) and it’s stated that the logo is trademarked by the company that owns it (not the author of the icon set), this is acceptable.

After all, social sites and payment companies do benefit when their logos are used on third party sites because this is great publicity for them and brings them traffic. Trademark owners definitely benefit more when a site uses an icon with their logo, than when the site adds some text like (Join us on Twitter) without any recognizable branding symbols of Twitter, or when the site doesn’t use anything that mentions Twitter.

I haven’t heard of anybody - a designer or a site master - having problems because of non-standard icons but I am curious to know the legal explanation why this use is OK, if it is, or why not, if it’s isn’t OK.

[Mittineague]

I’m guessing it isn’t as important if a site uses a

You
(Tube)

logo instead of

You(Tube)

as long as it links to youtube.com

- BUT - there would be a big problem if a

Yoo(Tube) logo was used to link to yootube.com

In other words, even though you might be diluting their brand recognition, as long as it is representing them they look the other way. But if you are using a version of the logo to misrepresent yourself as them or capitalize on their popularity, they would take action.