Should You Be Using Hosted Icon Themes for Your Projects?

Icons are exceedingly useful in many forms of interactive media such as software apps and websites because they can convey information that can be recognized at a glance without requiring extra space for lengthy text descriptions. There is a notably wide range of icons that are commonly understood to retain the same meaning despite being used in many contexts. An "X" icon placed near the corner of an element will almost always be understood to represent a method of "canceling out" or "closing" that element, for example, and users will most likely click on the "X" with the intention to carry out precisely that function. This is far more visually concise than having a text string like "close" take up space at the corner of a pop-up window that offers limited space for its respective content.

Websites can make use of their own icons so long as they are confident that users can identify their meaning and relevance without having to stop and think about it. The meaning of a given custom icon is self-evident on websites where the icons are essentially small illustrations of concepts that would be known to users who are familiar with the site's overall subject matter to begin with. For example, icons on a website that pertains to health care or nutrition can easily be recognized as visually representative of particular medical branches and can be used to mark pieces of content as relevant to those specific fields.

A website dedicated to hosting freely downloadable and usable health-related icons has fairly self-explanatory icons such as an image of a tooth that ideally represents content pertaining to odontology, an image of the classic double-helix pattern used to depict DNA, and so on. They can be saved to the user's computer both as SVG files and as PNG files in two different sizes. Some icons are less clear in their meaning than others, but each icon can be clicked so that tags categorizing it and allowing easy access to related icons can be viewed. The site allows the icons to be used and even edited without attribution. For more information click here https://healthicons.org/.