Fileformat 3 hours ago | next |

Shameless self promotion: I build a logo search engine that currently has almost 500K logos indexed: https://logosear.ch/

Also, a good source of official SVG logos is BIMI, a standard that uses DNS to point to the URL of an SVG.

Spec: https://bimigroup.org/

I recently scraped them for the top N domains: https://bimi-explorer.svg.zone/bimi/

alt227 an hour ago | root | parent |

Well done!

A couple of points.

It would be great if it listed the file format and size on the results page, so I dont have to click on every logo to find that informatino out.

How does this differ from doing a google image search of "$BRAND logo"?

ArcaneMoose 8 hours ago | prev | next |

Don't tell the guy who paid $70k for icons about this!

shahzaibmushtaq 2 hours ago | root | parent | next |

The guy who paid $70k to convert 14000 existing icons/logos to SVG for commercial use because he wanted to use these icons according to his product standards. All existing SVGs icons are for personal and study purposes, that's why he spent so much amount out of good faith, moral compliance and professional courtesy.

Moreover, this website has 3198 icons and what about the remaining icons as per his specifications?

One very important thing to note here is that these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License meaning you must allow users to download the source code no matter whether it's modified or not.

chrismorgan 28 minutes ago | root | parent | next |

> these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License

The only information I can find for this collection is CC-0 <https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/develop/LI...>.

Another important point is that licenses like AGPL are (simplifying slightly) copyright instruments, and for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be creative effort, which I expect not to be the case for at least the vast majority of the icons—they’ll be mechanical translations, more or less. The original creators will hold copyright over the designs, but I don’t believe there will be any further copyright on such an icon collection, just as photographs of public domain artwork don’t get copyright protection. I am conscientious about these details, and I’d be comfortable ignoring an AGPL claim on such a thing.

Also AGPL would not be a good license for a work like this. The GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code, and quite a bit of their terms are a little difficult to apply for such a collection as this. And their nature would largely prevent anyone from using the icons unless they wanted to license their stuff under (simplifying slightly) the same license.

taskforcegemini an hour ago | root | parent | prev |

can svg even be "not open source"?

PaulRobinson an hour ago | root | parent |

SVG the standard, no. SVG icons, absolutely. In the same way Python is open source, but I can write software using Python that is not open source.

druskacik an hour ago | root | parent |

But if you use it on the web, it becomes "open-source" - not by license, but for all practical purposes. Or am I wrong?

chrismorgan 19 minutes ago | root | parent | next |

The key to open source is the ability to modify it effectively.

To use GPLv3 definitions <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1>:

> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.

For icons like this, it’s just that there is no object code, the source code is the only form there is.

But supposing you had your SVG document with high precision, meaningful object IDs, Inkscape PowerStroke data (variable stroke thickness, which gets materialised in SVG as a path that gets fill), editor metadata and the likes, and then fed it through svgo and stripped all that stuff out, leaving just the bare bones, the original would be the source code, and the svg output object code.

To put it in the frame of another format where the difference is more stark, if you design something in Photoshop and you export it as PNG but don’t distribute the PSD, that ain’t Open Source. You can modify it, but not properly.

Or another: C, and a compiled binary. You can patch the binary, but that doesn’t make everything open source.

pestaa 36 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Open source is a category of licenses.

What you mean is that it is plaintext, and can be introspected. Great for many practical purposes, yes, but in business context, you are obligated to honor the actual license.

Hamuko 17 minutes ago | root | parent | prev |

If you find a GitHub repository with code inside it and no LICENSE file (or any other license specifier), it is not open source.

spoonfeeder006 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

And don't tell them about the browser inspector nor how to copy SVG code using that

bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago | root | parent |

I didn't want to tell you, but there is a thing called copyright. That said, if you copy SVG it is often easy to change the paths etc. and make it "yours". I guess I'd rather pay a small bit though.

Brajeshwar 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

What is the story? URL to read? (Search resulted in another CEO's $70K salary thing.)

Is this like Pepsi’s Million Dollar logo redesign?

ec109685 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

It’s quite the saga, including the designer putting in their portfolio that they actually completed the project as they were ghosting their client: https://x.com/Shpigford/status/1807802947394588842

dgfitz 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

$5.00/image. The math on that is absurd unless the artist is cranking what, 20 images an hour?

Feels like they thought they had an edge, probably an LLM, and it didn’t work out.

Also feels like it took $70k to generate 14,000 requirements, or the SOW is actually shit and this is all a disaster.

Disclaimer: I don’t read twitter, if all this was spelled out in the link I apologize

spoonfeeder006 3 hours ago | root | parent |

If you already starting from an existing set from publicly available sources, and you just need to standardize them amongst each other for consistency, then I can see how that would be kinda reasonable, though I'm no designer myself

perhaps things like giving them a consistent center or consistent brightness/contrast could be done programmatically as well, and maybe there are end user tools to do those things en masse

other tweaks such as selecting between subtle variations found in each icon, or adding some artistic modification, shadow mimicking, etc... can possibly be done, to align the set to a certain pre-defined theme now that I think about it more

seems like a pretty interesting kinda project actually

> Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation ~Baha'u'llah

the designer who chose to instead run with the money probably got insecure or bored, but they would probably be happier if they learned to appreciate the creative process more

spoonfeeder006 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

So what, he was asking the designer to re-create already existing icons? Or brand new icons for each stock?

Thats insanely fucked up either way of the designer leading them on like that or to ultimately cheat someone

phkahler 9 hours ago | prev | next |

Seems like a lot of trademark infringement suits about to come their way. Am I mistaken or is there no way this viable? In addition, nobody has any legal right to put others trademarks (use these) on anything without the trademark owners permission. So even if the site and distribution is somehow OK, nobody can really use them anyway. Right?

tialaramex 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

You're mostly fine unless you are confusing consumers. The purpose of these marks is exactly to avoid that, so you're going to get into a lot of trouble if you use the marks to mislead people in any way.

Take the Air China logo - if a not-so-bright reader might think you are Air China, you're using this all wrong. But if you use an Air China logo to signify the routes actually flown by Air China on a free world map of international flights on your web site, well, yeah, that's Air China, nobody is misled, even a moron knows the little logos on your map of the world aren't actually jet aeroplanes.

duxup 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm not sure if simply offering a brand's logo would be trademark infringement.

Years ago someone contacted me at the company I worked for claiming in some sorta pseudo legal language that we couldn't have one of our competitor's logos on our website. We had it on a promotional page comparing features across similar products.

Turns out we can do that in the US.

audiodude 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It's not trademark infringement to copy or display a logo. Trademark infringement happens when you confuse customers by using a logo or phrase and make them think that you're selling the actual product or that you're somehow endorsed by the original company.

diggan 8 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Font Awesome been available since 2013 at least, featuring brand icons https://web.archive.org/web/20130608045113/http://fontawesom...

Seems fine

duxup 8 hours ago | root | parent |

I always assumed Font Awesome had some business agreement with those orgs eventually as font awesome did charge for some of their icons IIRC.

Having said that, I'm not sure even that is legally necessary.

strogonoff 7 hours ago | root | parent |

I imagine avoiding IP legal issues with things like icons could be less about signing agreements with all involved companies and more about having a team that can respond professionally to an inquiry.

Businesses may often not really understand what’s going on and default to being worried about third-party use of their trademarks that they normally must defend. Perhaps they don’t need to worry in this case, where it may actually provide a bit of free advertisement, but if there’s no one on the other side then it wouldn’t help the case.

IANAL

benatkin 9 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

These and others have been online for a while, so I doubt it. There's more here, under the Brands / Social category: https://icones.js.org/

Yes, there are ways someone could use them that would not only run afoul of the trademark, but have trademark holders come after them. However, that doesn't make this useless, because there are proper and gray-area uses of these as well.

anticorporate 9 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

They probably each carry their own licensing and terms of use. I'd suspect there's a good number where reuse in some situations would be permitted, and in others would not. But every single one is going to be different, and just making assumptions is a quick way to blindly assume enormous legal liability.

hobofan 3 hours ago | root | parent |

That's why SimpleIcons contains metadata about that, so if you are worried about that, you can just exclude any icons that have explicit licensing information attached.

aniviacat 9 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I assume most brands are happy to see their icons being used/shared on as many platforms as possible. It's just free advertisment.

If someone uses them in a context that's actually problematic for the brand, the brand can still sue them then. But that won't be the common case.

ChrisMarshallNY 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Supplying the assets is not a problem. Most stock art orgs have brands. I suspect that they can get into "gray areas," if they charge for it.

Using them is the problematic part.

nottorp 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Isn't it also copyright infringement, and thus punishable by death in some enlightened jurisdictions [1], or at least by thousands in damages per infringement?

How many infringements do you generate by just loading the front page?

[1] Those most exposed to Hollywood lobbying.

vultour 8 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

It has existed for years and they actively remove icons when they get a takedown request. I'm sure most companies other than Oracle are happy to be there.

shahzaibmushtaq an hour ago | prev | next |

If you are going to use them somewhere in your online product/project, kindly check the License agreement first.

franciscop an hour ago | root | parent |

Also check the DISCLAIMER, which seems to be overriding the License:

- Disclaimer: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/master/DIS...

- License (CC0): https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/master/LIC...

InDubioProRubio an hour ago | root | parent |

Or just draw googly eyes on top and its a parody and totally legal art..

You can also have a NN turn it into a prompt and then recreate the SVG from prompt - shove it through the laundryAImat - nothing is sacred, the world they wanted they have now, let them suffer speared on there own swords.

https://svg.io/

keyle 8 hours ago | prev | next |

I find it amusing because in the past, I would have used this to find the logo of the company that I'd work for at the time.

I wonder how many employees of said brands will use this rather than their corporate environment to find an svg asset!

al_borland 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I’ve done this. The internal brand center was focused mostly on sales and people interfacing with customers.

I was using it for internal tools though. I’m sure if I made customer facing sites I would need to go through more official channels and make sure all the branding guidelines are followed to the letter.

albert_e 7 hours ago | prev | next |

Surprisingly - No Microsoft logos. (Windows, Office, Azure, ...)

KTibow 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Looks like the legal team reached out and said that making monochrome icons isn't allowed [0]

0: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/11236

BizyDev 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

That's really a shitty move from MS. But, technically, since they're still in the commit history, you can retrieve them for personnal/private use.

TRiG_Ireland 6 hours ago | prev | next |

The first one I downloaded (RTÉ colour) is an invalid SVG file.

Incidentally, what is the third icon on the home page, /e/? There's a name impossible to google.

chrismorgan an hour ago | root | parent | next |

The É is entity-encoded as &#201; in the SVG, but then they generate `data:` URIs in this specific place, but don’t URL-encode the # as %23.

mattigames 5 hours ago | prev | next |

Doesn't have pornhub or Brazzers, not even logo SVG archiving escapes the tentacles of the moral police (keep in mind pornhub it's one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world)

motoxpro 5 hours ago | root | parent |

Also no Microsoft logos (top two biggest companies in the world). The moral police are out of control! /s

mattigames 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Except I actually looked for the other top 10 most popular websites before making my comment, they are all there (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al), as you may know Microsoft.com doesn't even make it to the top 100