Armchair Theorist

Pimping up one’s blog with icons and widget bling is all the rage nowadays for bloggers. I’m no exception.

Recently, I decided to refresh and update my About page, and wanted to pimp it up with some social media icons to let my dozen or so readers know just how well connected I was on the Internet. (Eyes rolling…)

So I went and searched around the Internet, and here are the five best social media icon sets that I found.

To be on this list, my criteria is very simple:

1. It must be free.
2. It must be cool.
3. It must have icons for at least ten different social media services.

So without further ado… (drum roll) …here is the list:

1. Handycons

There is something about the rough simplicity of hand-drawn icons that just appeal to me.

Bonus points for providing all icons in four sizes: 16 x 16, 24 x 24, 32 x 32 and 48 x 48 pixels.

Homepage: Handycons set 1 | Handycons set 2

2. Elegant Social Media Icons

Nice, clean design. I also like the fact that every icon is like a speech bubble thus reinforcing the communicative aspects of social media. (OK, I’m reading too much into this already…)

Homepage: Color Version 2.0 | Black and White Version 1.0

3. Free Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set

Did I mention that I liked hand drawn icons? Did I also mention that these doodle icons are even awesomer than the Handycons above?

The icons are only available in one standard size, but bonus points for making the icons in transparency PNG file format, so you can overlay it on any background.

Homepage: Free Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set

4. Socialize Icons

I almost ended up using this icon set for myself. Simple, yet crisp design, and comes in a variety of sizes (16 x 16, 32 x 32, 48 x 48, 64 x 64, 128 x 128) and file formats (.ICO, .PNG, and even .ICNS for you Apple fans out there).

Homepage: Socialize Icons

The problem with each and everyone of the icon sets above is that they only cover the most popular online services.

Therefore, if you are using any of the more obscure or localized services, you will not be able to have one consistent set of icons which will cover all of the services you use, and you end up doing an ugly mix-and-match between different icon sets.

However, there is one social media icon set which I found that includes all of the social media services I use, and thus I decided to use it for my blog…

5. Yet Another Social Media Icon Set (YASMIS)

OK, so technically I didn’t “find” this icon set, but I created this myself. Whatever, it’s just a technicality.

And believe me when I say that I’m not much of a designer, and the only reason I was forced to create this icon set was because I really couldn’t find any other icon set out there that has all of the social media services which I used.

Dare I say this is the only social media icon set out there on the Internet that current has a consistently-stylized set of icons for Posterous, Toluu, Goodreads, BackType, and MyAnimeList.

Sometimes you want things done, you just have to do it yourself.

(Anyway, for those of you who picked up on the fact that the whole purpose for me to write this blog post was just to plug my own icon set, well done!)

Homepage: YASMIS