Freebie: Nice Things Icon Set (128 Icons, PNG + AI Source)
Inspiration strikes at funny times. Chris Behr was just watching TV and playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. His mind wasn’t focused on either task. He casually divided a square into a grid, then randomly colored it. Something about the colors inspired him to combine the grid with a couple of icons that he had been doodling the night before. Thus, Nice Things was born, a set of 128 original, beautiful icons that we are honoured to present to you.
A preview of the lovely Nice Things icon set.
Chris wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to hit the ground running. So, you get three PNG sizes: 100×100, 400×400 and 800×800 pixels — all available with and without backgrounds. In addition, the set includes the original source AI file, complete with named layers, to help you find what you need.
Nice Things includes 128 carefully drawn illustrations of all kinds of pretty things around us — a bike, birthday cake, watch, traffic light, game console, doughnut, speaker, rollerskate, starship and much more. You may freely use it for both private and commercial projects, without any restrictions, including for software, online services, templates and themes.
The vector-based files are easy to edit and break out individually. (Sneak peek)
Hit the ground running with three different PNG sizes! (Sneak peek)
A preview of all of the icons in this set (View larger preview)
Download The Icon Set For Free
Insight From The Designer
Here is some insight from Chris Behr himself:
It would be easy to say that I started working on Nice Things in the belief that I’d actually finish it. Like most designers, my computer is littered with the remains of half-finished projects. I decided to make this a project that I actually finished, and I set in place some very simple rules:
- Every week, I had to finish at least one new icon.
- I could draw only what I considered to be a nice thing. No guns, bombs or the like.
- I had to restrict the color palette. In this case, I chose the “Russian Poster Art” swatches in Illustrator.
At first, it was easy to think of what to draw. But as the weeks wore on, it became more and more difficult. Thankfully, my wonderful colleagues at Skyscanner were only too happy to help; and with the creation of a quick Google Doc, I had enough ideas to last me through Christmas.
I don’t have any noble goals with Nice Things beyond it being of help. Since starting college eight years ago, I’ve enjoyed the fruits of the design community without really giving anything back. Fonts, icons, templates — each and every one of them has helped me where I’ve needed it, and I hope that I can offer that same help to a designer or developer in need.
While I don’t have any noble goals, I do have a selfish one. I’d love to see my icons used as widely as possible. And if you happen to see me in a list of conference attendees, well, I can guarantee a “Hoorah!” from the audience if you use one.
Thank you, dear Chris, for the fantastic icon set. We sincerely appreciate your time and effort!
(ea, il, al)
© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2013.
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Inspiration strikes at funny times. Chris Behr was just watching TV and playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. His mind wasn’t focused on either task. He casually divided a...
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Sun, 03 Nov 2013 15:25:51 -0500
When I Was in College, I Didn't Know ...
by David Hoffman
I was a sensitive young man, sometimes confused or hurt by social situations and people's behavior. In the years after college, I finally started to see patterns in circumstances that had baffled me or caused me pain. I began to write them down, so that I would not forget. After several years, I had compiled the collection set forth below. Even now, a couple of decades later, I still find it useful, because occasionally I still need the reminders.
I first published my list on Co-Create UMBC six years ago, and have re-posted it each year. There is a second list, compiled after I arrived at UMBC in 2003, which I'll post later this week (UPDATE: Posted here).
1.
A very large portion of people’s behavior is driven by insecurity. And a very large portion of the behavior that stems from insecurity can look like confidence.
2.
In many situations, people face a choice between doing something in a way that feels right, resonates, comes from the heart, makes sense, and fits the moment; or doing the thing in the way that they think they are supposed to do it. Examples: Giving a speech; proposing marriage; dealing with somebody’s emotional crisis; disciplining a child; interviewing a job candidate; responding “heroically” to a threat. More often than not, the genuine approach produces more satisfying results. And more often than not, people instead choose to do what they think they are supposed to do. (Part of the problem is that people’s sense of what they are supposed to do comes from many sources, including media, that present the relevant situations in misleading ways. For example, the media may capture the mechanical aspects of an effective speech but not the way the words match the emotions of the moment).
3.
Situations take a while to play out. There’s no need to panic, or to assume that what initially seems to be true will always be true.
4.
People tend to overreact.
5.
A situation that has been imagined, read about, etc. may not be easily recognized when it becomes a real situation. This is because the feel of the imagined situation may have been very distinctive, but the real situation feels much more like every other real situation. Examples: “corruption,” “falling in love,” “heroism.”
6.
In many situations, a variety of motivations drive people’s choice of actions. These motivations can range from deeply spiritual to simply practical. However, over time, the more abstract motivations tend to be forgotten, and the more practical motivations remembered and acted upon. It’s hard to cling to a concept; but practicalities—deadlines, costs, etc.—are hard to forget, and create their own inertia. As a result, people repeatedly find themselves going through the motions: continuing to do things that they once made the choice to do, but without retaining any sense of connection to their deepest needs and motivations. They feel lost, and their activities provide no real sustenance.
7.
People are not their roles.
8.
Many situations apparently resolved through formal processes, such as hiring staff, or creating legislation, are really resolved through a complex combination of formal and informal processes. Very often, the informal processes—which may be unacknowledged and hidden from view—are the more important ones.
9.
The key to effective communication is to understand one’s audience. And a lot of people can’t or don’t bother to understand many audiences for their communications.
10.
People may have to hear the same good idea many times before it enters their consciousness.
11.
Ideas are not appreciated or rewarded in proportion to their truth, beauty, explanatory power, or even social value. Other factors typically matter more. Among them: The credentials of the idea’s originator (however arbitrary their connection to the idea); the prospect that somebody can turn a profit from the idea; and the degree to which the idea departs from, or even improves upon, accepted wisdom (the more it does, the less likely it will be appreciated and rewarded).
12.
Often people want things for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. It’s just something that they feel—maybe the subtle combination of a number of subjective factors (“I want Chinese food—even though we had Chinese last night;” “I want to go home now;” “I want this job despite the fact that it pays less than the other one”). Because they are personal impulses rather than the products of reasoning, these desires can be difficult to assert or defend. In forums where a collective decision is being made, logical arguments may be favored and impulsive arguments dismissed. But the impulses are real, and their connection to people’s welfare is real as well. It is perfectly legitimate to act on such impulses, and to resist the people who try to defeat them with arguments.
13.
Many actions appear to reflect clear, easily inferred motives but in fact do not. People and institutions do all sorts of things that may seem planned, polished and connected to a strategic agenda, but actually are the products of inertia, laziness, whim, jittery responses to incomplete information, or other motives more complex or confused than they seem.
14.
Social change happens in a gestalt—not as the result of any single well-conceived, well-executed program, policy or intervention. There is no single initiative that will save the world. This is because people, institutions, relationships and cultures are extremely complex. Any single action aimed at social change, however well-conceived and widely supported, is likely to be challenged, diverted, thwarted, misunderstood and/or misapplied in a thousand different ways. But honest, thoughtful efforts can have a cumulative effect. Slowly, person-by-person, relationship-by-relationship, they shift the underlying culture and expectations. So the good that we do is not always the immediate good that we intend.
15.
People express opinions for a lot of different reasons. That they really, deeply believe in what they are saying is only one of them.
16.
Overly zealous advocacy of a certain perspective alienates people who might otherwise have adopted that perspective in due time.
17.
The most insidious way to attack or undermine an idea is to call something else by its name.
18.
There are many situations that feel rotten, even when handled perfectly. (Examples: consoling somebody on the death of a friend; apologizing for a mistake that caused a lot of harm). So it is a mistake to assume from the rotten feeling that you have said or done the wrong thing.
19.
A picture left in the same place on the wall long enough will become invisible.
20.
Some things can be learned only through experience.
21.
When the true relationship between cause and effect is unknown, very simple patterns can appear vastly more complicated than they really are.
22.
Perceptions freeze more easily than situations. Once a person has formed a perception of a situation, he or she is likely to miss the fact that the situation has shifted subtly or gradually over time.
23.
Ambiguities in the early part of an arrangement can be costly to resolve. They may be the only things making the arrangement possible. Business deals, marriages, friendships—all may depend on the parties failing to reveal and resolve conflicts in their perceptions about the facts behind their transactions. If one of the parties, at the commencement of an arrangement, sees that these unresolved conflicts may exist, it can be very tempting to keep quiet about them and hope for the best. But the cost of cleaning up the messes that can arise when these conflicts come to light later, long after all parties have begun to take actions consistent with their own perceptions, can be far, far greater. In general, it is much better to name and attempt to resolve ambiguities on the front end of an arrangement rather than risk the catastrophe of having them derail the arrangement later.
24.
Justice is often associated with equality. “Splitting the difference” has a ring of fairness to it. Exhibiting “balance” in reporting on a situation—for example, devoting the same amount of journalistic space to each side of a controversy—seems evenhanded. But in situations in which there actually is a fundamental underlying inequality, treating people equally is fundamentally unjust. For example, if two people disagree about ten aspects of a transaction, but one of the two people is correct about all ten aspects and the other is simply lying for his or her own gain, it would be unjust to conclude that each person must be right about five of the ten sources of disagreement, or to simply “split the difference.”
25.
The two major sources of happiness are self-expression and love. And in truth, they are the same things.
Which items on my list resonate with you? What patterns have you been able to discern from your own experiences?
]]>
by David Hoffman I was a sensitive young man, sometimes confused or hurt by social situations and people's behavior. In the years after college, I finally started to see patterns in circumstances...
http://cocreateumbc.blogspot.com/2013/11/when-i-was-in-college-i-didnt-know.html
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Sun, 03 Nov 2013 14:48:00 -0500
Sun, 03 Nov 2013 14:48:00 -0500
Talk: Niloy Ganguly on Topical Search in Twitter, 1pm Tue 11/5, ITE 459
UMBC Information Systems Department
Topical Search in Twitter
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
1:00pm Tuesday, 5 November 2013, ITE 459
Twitter is now a popular platform for discovering real-time news on various topics. We are developing methodologies to improve topical search in Twitter, specifically search for topical experts and popular content on specific topics. Utilizing social annotations provided by the Twitter population through the Lists feature, we have developed the following:
- A novel who-is-who system for Twitter, which gives the topical attributes of a specified user. The list-based methodology gives accurate and comprehensive topical attributes for millions of popular Twitter users.
- A search system for topical experts in Twitter. Comparison of our system with the expert search service offered by Twitter shows that the List-based method provide better results for a large number of topical queries.
- A novel topical search system which, given a topic, identifies and clusters the content (tweets, hashtags) being discussed by the community of experts on that topic. Our methodology gives relevant and trustworthy content for a wide range of topics. To the best our knowledge, this is the first systematic attempt to utilize social annotations to provide topical search in Twitter.
Niloy Ganguly is an associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He received his PhD from Bengal Engineering and Science University, Calcutta, India and his Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. He has been a post doctoral fellow in Technical University of Dresden, Germany. He focuses on investigating several different aspects on online-social networks. He has worked on designing recommendation system based on community structures on various web-social networks like Twitter and Delicious. He has also simultaneously worked on various theoretical issues related to dynamical large networks often termed as complex networks. Specifically he has looked into problems related to percolation, evolution of networks as well as flow of information over these networks. He has been collaborating with various national and international universities and research lab including Duke University, TU Dresden, Germany, MPI PKS and MPI SWS, Germany, Microsoft Lab, India etc. He currently publishes in various top ranking international journals and conferences including CCS, PODC, ICDM, ACL, WWW, INFOCOM, SIGIR, Euro Physics Letters, Physical Review E, ACM and IEEE Transactions, etc.
]]>
UMBC Information Systems Department Topical Search in Twitter Dr. Niloy Ganguly Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur 1:00pm Tuesday, 5 November 2013, ITE 459 Twitter is now a popular...
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Sun, 03 Nov 2013 10:09:54 -0500
7 Steps to Finding Success as a Millennial Entrepreneur Rea
Entrepreneur Blog entry by Blaine Vess
Older generations say millennials have short attention spans, a sense of entitlement, and little patience. The fact is, those qualities are not necessarily bad -- especially for young entrepreneurs.
What some call faults can actually be advantages if leveraged in the right way. The key is finding that sweet-spot between youthful enthusiasm and the more “old-fashioned” values that have served as the backbone of business for generations. I started my company when I was a freshman in college. Fourteen years later, we are generating annual revenues in excess of $10 million.
Here’s what I’ve learned about striking that balance:
1. Stay energetic. Starting a successful business requires tireless enthusiasm. You have to be excited about the product or service you’re providing. If you’re not, no one else will be. On the flip side, enthusiasm is infectious. Your excitement can help you secure business leads and build a committed, energetic team. Your Gen X and Boomer counterparts can attest, you will never have as much energy -- and stamina to work through late nights -- as you do now.
2. Be impatient. Ironically, sometimes the same people who tell you not to be so impatient will remind you that the early bird catches the worm. What they don’t realize is that your impatience stems from your desire to get that worm! Take that impatience and run with it. When a problem arises, don’t wait around hoping it will get resolved. Take action to fix it immediately. Speed and your drive to produce immediate, quality results will serve you well.
3. Take risks. Launching a successful business almost always requires risk taking. Lucky for you, that pill is pretty easy to swallow right now. When you’re young, you have less to lose from a failed business attempt than you will ever again. If you think you have a good idea, give it an honest try. At the very least, you’ll learn something. Now is the time to be bold.
4. Stay social. Do your parents ask you for help with “the Twitter?” When you’re done rolling your eyes at them, consider what an advantage you have as an entrepreneur. Social Media is indispensable for expanding your network, increasing product awareness and building your brand. While older business owners may be struggling to learn the latest social protocol, it’s already second nature to you.
5. Seek help and advice. Smart entrepreneurs know how and when to ask for help. Talk to business owners you admire, read about successful innovators, and seek out a mentor.
6. Hire experience. There is something to be said for life experience. Consider hiring someone older than you when it makes sense. You’ll set yourself up with a team that has the benefits of youth and the advantages of experience. Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg, a woman with 15 years more experience than he had. Both of them contribute differently to create a company balanced in youth and business expertise.
7. Stay social, for real. Forming real, personal relationships is good business, and this is often best done face-to-face. I love social networking, but it’s not a replacement for getting to know someone in person. Take your hand off the mouse, move your eyes away from the screen, and go meet someone. What are you waiting for? Your next client is out there waiting for you to find them.
]]>
Older generations say millennials have short attention spans, a sense of entitlement, and little patience. The fact is, those qualities are not necessarily bad -- especially for young...
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229676
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