Do you regularly need to insert icons into your InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator files?
If so, check out the add-ons available from the Noun Project. They give you access to over one million royalty-free icons (with a paid subscription). You can also access the icons for free with a Creative Commons license via the website. Add-ons are also available for Microsoft Office apps.
What is the Noun Project?
The Noun Project is an ever-expanding library of icons created by designers from around the world. Anyone can design and upload icons to the Noun Project. If your icons are approved, they are added to the collection, and you get a fee anytime someone purchases your icons, or downloads them via subscription access. For full details on submitting your icons, check out the Creators page at the Noun Project.
You can access the full set of royalty-free icons with a NounPro account for a $39.99 annual subscription or $9.99 per month.
You can also access all the icons from the website by creating a free account. When you’re logged in, you can download icons in SVG or PNG formats. Once you choose the file format you want, you pick your licensing terms. You can download and use icons for free by choosing (and abiding by the terms of) a Creative Commons license.
If you want the royalty-free license, you have to subscribe or pay for each icon à la carte ($2 per icon).
Using the Noun Project Panel
Once you’ve installed the add-on, you can open the panel by choosing Window > Extensions > Noun Project.
To add an icon to your InDesign layout, browse or search for the type of icon you want. If you search, you’ll see not only free icons but locked ones that you can access only via subscription (royalty-free license) or the website (Creative Commons license).
You can also choose the color for your icon in the panel, via a picker, using RGB, Hex, or HSL values. Unfortunately, you can’t choose colors from your Swatches panel.
You can also pick a size, but since the icons are vector objects inserted as embedded PDF files, you can scale them to any size without loss of quality.
Then just click Insert Icon to place it into your layout.
The icon will appear as an embedded PDF in the Links panel.
Clicking the curved arrow in the Noun Project panel takes you to the icon’s web page, where you can download or purchase the icon, and access related icons.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on August 10, 2017
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